A gradient magnitude based region growing algorithm for accurate segmentation

An accurate segmentation is critical for clinical application of medical images. The undesirable partial-volume-effect, which lies on a boundary between a high intensity region and a low intensity region, makes unerring boundary determination a difficult task. A new approach to segmentation is required for removing the adverse effect on the boundary, which is unwanted especially from the point of view of volume rendering. Here, we propose a gradient magnitude based region growing algorithm for accurate segmentation. The gradient is useful for enhancing the boundary because it emphasizes the difference among voxel values. By analyzing the gradient magnitude, we can see the sufficient contrast which must be presented on the boundary region and we use this contrast to increase the accuracy of our segmentation method. We pay attention only to the boundary region, not to the whole large volumetric dataset itself, making it more computationally efficient.