White matter lesion segmentation using robust parameter estimation algorithm

White matter lesions are common brain abnormalities. In this paper, we introduce an automatic algorithm for segmentation of white matter lesions from brain MRI images. The intensities of each tissue is assumed to be Gaussian distributed, whose parameters (mean vector and covariance matrix) are estimated using a tissue distribution model. And then a measure is defined to indicate in how much content a voxel belongs to the lesions. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm works well.