Comparison of active contour and fast marching methods of hippocampus segmentation

The hippocampus is a part of the limbic system and plays an important role in long-term memory and spatial navigation. As part of hippocampal imaging studies, the region of the hippocampus is usually segmented manually, which is a time-consuming process. Here, we describe a comparison of the active contour model (ACM) and the fast marching method (FMM) using magnetic resonance (MR) images of the human brain. We determine optimized input parameters for both models to segment the hippocampus using T1-weighted MR images, and we found that the ACM provided superior performance compared with the FMM without significant additional computational expense.