A Cooperative Approach Based on Local Detection of Similarities and Discontinuities for Brain MR Images Segmentation

Abstract

This paper introduces a new cooperative multi-agent approach for segmenting brain Magnetic Resonance Images (MRIs). MRIs are manually processed by human radiology experts for the identification of many diseases and the monitoring of their evolution. However, such a task is time-consuming and depends on expert decision, which can be affected by many factors. Therefore, various types of research were and are still conducted to automate MRI processing, mainly MRI segmentation. The approach presented in this paper, without any parametrization or prior knowledge, uses a set of situated agents, locally interacting to segment images according to two main phases: the detection of discontinuities and the detection of similarities. An implementation of this approach was tested on phantom brain MR images to assess the results and prove its efficiency. Experimental results ensure a minimum of 89% Dice coefficient with increasing values of the noise and the intensity non-uniformity.