Automatic segmentation of basal ganglia iron deposits from structural MRI.
Andreas Glatz, María del C. Valdés Hernández, Alexander J. Kiker, Mark E. Bastin, Susana Muñoz Maniega, Natalie A. Royle, Ian J. Deary, Joanna Marguerite Wardlaw · MIUA · 2011
Brain iron deposits have recently been suggested as biomarkers for small brain vessel diseases. Here, we present a novel, automated method for segmenting brain iron deposits in the basal ganglia from structural MRI data. It is based on minimum-variance clustering of intensities from T1and T2∗-weighted volumes, and a supervised cluster selection algorithm. This method was evaluated with MR data from 24 subjects and compared with iron deposit masks segmented manually by an experienced rater. A median Jaccard similarity index of 0.64 between manual and automatically generated segmentation masks is promising and encourages further investigations to improve the computing speed and accuracy of the method.