Emerging segmentation of neuroanatomical structures in magnetic resonance images

The emerging scheme (J.C. Rajapakse and F. Kruggel) is used to segment neuroanatomical structures in magnetic resonance (MR) head scans. Emerging is a region growing technique which is guided by the edgeness profile of the image. It is similar to the watershed algorithm (L. Vincent and P. Soille, 1991), but allows splitting of regions in catchment basins and merging at watershed boundaries. Region boundaries in MR head scans are fuzzy and compositions of tissues of some structures render varying intensity patterns. These characteristics and scanner limitations pose difficulties to unsupervised segmentation of MR head scans. We present emerging as a segmentation technique that overcomes these difficulties to produce reasonable segmentations of neuroanatomical structures.