Adaptive weighted fusion of multiple MR sequences for brain lesion segmentation

Abstract : We propose a technique for fusing the output of multiple Magnetic Resonance (MR) sequences to robustly and accurately segment brain lesions. It is based on a Bayesian multi-sequence Markov model that includes weight parameters to account for the relative importance and control the impact of each sequence. The Bayesian framework has the advantage of allowing 1) the incorporation of expert knowledge on the a priori relevant information content of each sequence and 2) a weighting scheme which is modified adaptively according to the data and the segmentation task under consideration. The model, applied to the detection of multiple sclerosis and stroke lesions shows promising results.