Title: Analysis of brainstem in Alzheimer MR images using Lattice Boltzmann level set

Authors: Ramesh Munirathinam; Sujatha Chinnaswamy Manoharan

Addresses: Karuvee Innovations Private Limited, IITM Incubation Cell, IITM Research Park, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India ' Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Anna University, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract: Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a progressive neurological disorder resulting in the cognitive impairment of elderly people. The brainstem is considered as a significant pathological core for the study of psychological and behavioural symptoms occurring before cognitive impairment. In this work, the brainstem is extracted from T1 weighted brain MR images using Lattice Boltzmann (LB) criterion based regional level set method. The segmentation results are validated using regional statistic and overlap measures. The results show that the region-based segmentation is capable of extracting the brainstem more accurately by preserving the weak and blurred edges of the brainstem. The extracted geometric and textural features are able to show a significant difference in the normal and AD brainstem images. The feature values obtained from AD images are found to be less compared to the normal images. This might be due to the neuronal loss in the brainstem describing the atrophy. Hence, this analysis proved to be clinically significant.

Keywords: Alzheimer's disease; non-cognitive symptoms; brainstem; regional level set; Lattice Boltzmann level set; morphological analysis; textural analysis.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBET.2019.096878

International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, 2019 Vol.29 No.1, pp.17 - 33

Received: 06 Jul 2016
Accepted: 27 Sep 2016
Published online: 13 Dec 2018 *

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