Level Set Based Hippocampus Segmentation in MR Images with Improved Initialization Using Region Growing

The hippocampus has been known as one of the most important structures referred to as Alzheimer's disease and other neurological disorders. However, segmentation of the hippocampus from MR images is still a challenging task due to its small size, complex shape, low contrast, and discontinuous boundaries. For the accurate and efficient detection of the hippocampus, a new image segmentation method based on adaptive region growing and level set algorithm is proposed. Firstly, adaptive region growing and morphological operations are performed in the target regions and its output is used for the initial contour of level set evolution method. Then, an improved edge-based level set method utilizing global Gaussian distributions with different means and variances is developed to implement the accurate segmentation. Finally, gradient descent method is adopted to get the minimization of the energy equation. As proved by experiment results, the proposed method can ideally extract the contours of the hippocampus that are very close to manual segmentation drawn by specialists.