Training Data Generation for U-Net Based MRI Image Segmentation using Level-Set Methods

Image segmentation has been a well-addressed problem in pattern recognition for the last few decades. As a sub-problem of image segmentation, the background separation in biomedical images generated by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has also been of interest in the applied mathematics literature. Level set evolution of active contours idea can successfully be applied to MRI images to extract the region of interest (ROI) as a crucial preprocessing step for medical image analysis. In this study, we use the classical level set solution to create binary masks of various brain MRI images in which black color implies background and white color implies the ROI. We further used the MRI image and mask image pairs to train a deep neural network (DNN) architecture called U-Net, which has been proven to be a successful model for biomedical image segmentation. Our experiments have shown that a properly trained U-Net can achieve a matching performance of the level set method. Hence we were able to train a U-Net by using automatically generated input and label data successfully. The trained network can detect ROI in MRI images faster than the level-set method and can be used as a preprocessing tool for more enhanced medical image analysis studies