A Weighted Multi-Sequence Markov Model For Brain Lesion Segmentation

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 an augmented multi-sequence Hidden Markov model that includes additional weight variables to account for the relative importance and control the impact of each sequence. The augmented 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.