Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
IETE JOURNAL OF RESEARCH, cilt.63, sa.4, ss.461-472, 2017 (SCI-Expanded)
White matter lesions (WMLs) in the human brain are generally diagnosed by using magnetic resonance (MR) images. Doctors working on WMLs generally need to calculate the volume of lesions for each patient at regular intervals in order to observe the course of diseases and manage the treatment process. This paper introduces an unsupervised automatic approach for segmentation of WMLs in the human brain. The approach consists of skull stripping, preprocessing, and lesion detection steps. Three skull stripping methods are proposed to increase successful stripping probability on various qualities of MR image data. After preprocessing and segmenting lesions, the system applies volumetric calculation and 3D visualization of lesions. This volumetric information can be used by doctors to observe changes in the lesions against regularly scanned MR images of patients. GPU-based parallel image processing techniques are utilized on Nvidia CUDA environment in order to improve performance by 40-50times. Therefore, the developed system saves the time of doctors by providing them a fast automatic segmentation method for WMLs.