Automatic segmentation of the skull in MRI sequences using level set method

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has been widely used in clinical diagnose. Segmentation of these images obtained by MRI is a necessary procedure in medical image processing. In this paper, an improved level set algorithm was proposed to optimize the segmentation of MRI image sequences based on article [1]. Firstly, we add an area term and the edge indicator function to the total energy function for single image segmentation. Secondly, we presented a new method which uses the circumscribed polygon of the previous segmentation result as the initial contour of the next image to achieve automatic segmentation of image sequences. The algorithm was tested on MRI image sequences provided by Chuiyanliu Hospital, Chaoyang District of Beijing; the results have indicated that the proposed algorithm can effectively enhance the segmentation speed and quality of MRI sequences.