Segmentation of low contrast-to-noise ratio images applied to functional imaging using adaptive region growing

Segmentation in medical imaging plays a critical role easing the delineation of key anatomical functional structures in all the imaging modalities. However, many segmentation approaches are optimized with the assumption of high contrast. and then fail when segmenting poor contrast to noise objects. The number of approaches published in the literature falls dramatically when functional imaging is the aim. In this paper a feature extraction based approach, based on region growing, is presented as a segmentation technique suitable for poor quality (low Contrast to Noise Ratio CNR) images, as often found in functional images derived from Autoradiography. The region growing combines some modifications from the typical region growing method, to make the algorithm more robust and more reliable. Finally the algorithm is validated using synthetic images and biological imagery.