Automatic segmentation of brain structures using geometric moment invariants and artificial neural networks

We propose an automatic method for the segmentation of the brain structures in three dimensional (3D) Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI). The proposed method consists of two stages. In the first stage, we represent the shape of the structure using Geometric Moment Invariants (GMIs) in 8 scales. For each scale, an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is designed to approximate the signed distance function of a desired structure. The GMIs along with the voxel intensities and coordinates are used as the input features of the ANN and the signed distance function as its output. In the second stage, we combine the outputs of the ANNs of the first stage and design another ANN to classify the image voxels into two classes, inside or outside of the structure. We introduce a fast method for moment calculations. The proposed method is applied to the segmentation of caudate, putamen, and thalamus in MRI where it has outperformed other methods in the literature.