Nonlocal intracranial cavity extraction.

Automatic and accurate methods to estimate normalized regional brain volumes from MRI data are valuable tools which may help to obtain an objective diagnosis and followup of many neurological diseases. To estimate such regional brain volumes, the intracranial cavity volume (ICV) is often used for normalization. However, the high variability of brain shape and size due to normal intersubject variability, normal changes occurring over the lifespan, and abnormal changes due to disease makes the ICV estimation problem challenging. In this paper, we present a new approach to perform ICV extraction based on the use of a library of prelabeled brain images to capture the large variability of brain shapes. To this end, an improved nonlocal label fusion scheme based on BEaST technique is proposed to increase the accuracy of the ICV estimation. The proposed method is compared with recent state-of-the-art methods and the results demonstrate an improved performance both in terms of accuracy and reproducibility while maintaining a reduced computational burden.