Title: Multistage approach for automatic spleen segmentation in MRI sequences

Authors: Antonia Mihaylova; Veska Georgieva; Plamen Petrov

Addresses: Technical University of Sofia, Kliment Ohridsky Str. 8, Sofia 1000, Bulgaria ' Technical University of Sofia, Kliment Ohridsky Str. 8, Sofia 1000, Bulgaria ' Technical University of Sofia, Kliment Ohridsky Str. 8, Sofia 1000, Bulgaria

Abstract: Most of the known methods of segmentation of the abdominal organs are not automated for the whole series of images or are semi-automatic and require additional intervention by the user. This is typical for cases where the difference in intensity of the grey level between the subject and the background is small. This paper presents a multistage approach for spleen segmentation from MRI-sequences. It is based on segmentation methods such as active contours without edges and k-mean clustering. The proposed approach consists of some basic stages. The first stage is pre-processing, based on image enhancement and morphological operation. Two atlas models are created, which are used in the initial image to define the initial contour at which the segmentation begins. The proposed approach allows extracting the spleen in the different depth images, which has a variable form and unstable position. The conducted experiments are showing the robustness of the proposed approach. The obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach for application in screening diagnostics.

Keywords: MRI sequences; spleen segmentation; automatic segmentation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJRIS.2020.106806

International Journal of Reasoning-based Intelligent Systems, 2020 Vol.12 No.2, pp.128 - 137

Received: 01 May 2018
Accepted: 03 Sep 2018
Published online: 21 Apr 2020 *

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