A NURBS-Based Technique for the Segmentation of Medical Images

Extracting the human brain from magnetic resonance head scans is difficult because of its highly convoluted and nonuniform geometry. A technique based on Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS) and energy minimising deformable models to extract the brain surface accurately from MR head scans is presented. The weighting parameter that comes with the NURBS definition is explored to attract the surface into the regions showing high curvature. The weight at each control point is adjusted automatically according to the curvature properties of the evolving surface. This process facilitates a deformable surface with increased local flexibility that adapts to complex geometrical features of the brain. The results show that the proposed model is capable of capturing the correct brain surface with a higher accuracy than the existing techniques.