3D brain segmentation using active appearance models and local regressors

Abstract

We describe an efficient and accurate method for segmenting sets of subcortical structures in 3D MR images of the brain. We first find the approximate position of all the structures using a global Active Appearance Model (AAM). We then refine the shape and position of each structure using a set of individual AAMs trained for each. Finally we produce a detailed segmentation by computing the probability that each voxel belongs to the structure, using regression functions trained for each individual voxel. The models are trained using a large set of labelled images, using a novel variant of 'groupwise' registration to obtain the necessary image correspondences. We evaluate the method on a large dataset, and demonstrate that it achieves results comparable with some of the best published.