A novel Markov random field model based on region adjacency graph for T1 magnetic resonance imaging brain segmentation

Tissue segmentation in magnetic resonance brain scans is the most critical task in different aspects of brain analysis. Because manual segmentation of brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images is a time-consuming and labor-intensive procedure, automatic image segmentation is widely used for this purpose. As Markov Random Field (MRF) model provides a powerful tool for segmentation of images with a high level of artifacts, it has been considered as a superior method. But because of the high computational cost of MRF, it is not appropriate for online processing. This article has proposed a novel method based on a proper combination of MRF model and watershed algorithm in order to alleviate the MRF's drawbacks. Results illustrate that the proposed method has a good ability in MRI image segmentation, and also decreases the computational time effectively, which is a valuable improvement in the online applications. (C) 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.