A novel template based approach to the segmentation of the hippocampal region

The work described in this document is part of a major work aiming at a complete pipeline for the extraction of clinical parameters from MR images of the brain, for the diagnosis of neuro-degenerative diseases. A key step in this pipeline is the identification of a box containing the hippocampus and surrounding medial temporal lobe regions from T1-weighted magnetic resonance images, with no interactive input from the user. To this end we introduced in the existing pipeline a module for the segmentation of brain tissues based on a constrained Gaussians mixture model (CGMM), and a novel method for generating templates of the hippocampus. The templates are then combined in order to obtain only one template mask. This template mask is used, with a mask of the grey matter of the brain, for determining the hippocampus. The results have been visually evaluated by a small set of experts, and have been judged as satisfactory. A complete and exhaustive evaluation of the whole system is being planned.