Segmentation of magnetic resonance image using fractal dimension

In recent years, much research has been conducted in the three-dimensional visualization of medical image. This requires a good segmentation technique. Many early works use first-order and second-order statistics. First-order statistical parameters can be calculated quickly but their effectiveness is influenced by many factors such as illumination, contrast and random noise of the image. Second-order statistical parameters, such as spatial gray level co-occurrence matrices statistics, take longer time to compute but can extract the textural information. In this investigating, two different parameters, namely the entropy and the fractal dimension, are employed to perform segmentation of the magnetic resonance images of the head of a male cadaver. The entropy is calculated from the spatial gray level co-occurrence matrices. The fractal dimension is calculated by the reticular cell counting method. Several regions of the human head are chosen for analysis. They are the bone, gyrus and lobe. Results show that the parameters are able to segment different types of tissue. The entropy gives very good result but it requires very long computation time and large amount of memory. The performance of the fractal dimension is comparable with the entropy. It is simple to estimate and demands lesser memory space.