Cross entropy: a new solver for Markov random field modeling and applications to medical image segmentation

This paper introduces a novel solver, namely cross entropy (CE), into the MRF theory for medical image segmentation. The solver, which is based on the theory of rare event simulation, is general and stochastic. Unlike some popular optimization methods such as belief propagation and graph cuts, CE makes no assumption on the form of objective functions and thus can be applied to any type of MRF models. Furthermore, it achieves higher performance of finding more global optima because of its stochastic property. In addition, it is more efficient than other stochastic methods like simulated annealing. We tested the new solver in 4 series of segmentation experiments on synthetic and clinical, vascular and cerebral images. The experiments show that CE can give more accurate segmentation results.