Abstract：Brain extraction is an important preprocessing step in most of image analyses for cerebral MRI image. ASIFT(Scale Invariant Featun Transform) feature matching based brain extraction method was proposed in this paper for the precise and robust brain extraction. This method combined the tessellated surface based method (BET) and atlas based method. Firstly,the BET method was used to evolve the brain contour, and the SIFT features of the key points on brain contour were extracted iteratively to find the matched key points between the target image and atlas image using weak constraint of spatial distance based matching method. Next, the matched points were used to renew the parameter of BET and the brain contour iteratively, thus a robust brain contour was obtained. At last, a graph cuts method was used to refine the brain contour to obtain a precise brain contour. Twenty MRI volumes from IBSR web site were tested using this method and other three methods, and the proposed method obtained the highest Dice precision (0.962±0.008), Jaccard precision (0.926±0.014) and specificity (0.994±0.004), as well as the lowest false positives rate (4.95%±2.74%) and lower false negatives rate (2.82%±2.0%). The highest extraction precisions demonstrated this method precise, and the lower corresponding standard deviations showed this method was robust. Therefore, this proposed method is a precise and robust brain extraction method.
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