Segmentation of Rat Brain MR Images Using Artificial Neural Network Classifier

Recently MR image based computational models are being developed to assist targeted drug delivery in the brain by helping determine appropriate catheter position, drug dose among others to achieve the desired drug distribution [1–3]. Such a planning might be important to prevent damaging healthier tissues because many of the drugs (e.g. chemotherapeutic agents) are usually toxic and needs to be concentrated in specific regions of interest (e.g. tumor). However, for the image based model to make accurate predictions, it is important to segment the image and assign appropriate tissue properties such as hydraulic conductivity which are known to vary significantly within the brain. For example, it has been experimentally found that drugs injected into brain parenchyma get preferentially transported along the white matter tracts compared to the gray matter regions [4]. Segmenting MR images is a challenging task since the pixel intensities between different regions often overlap, hence traditional approaches based on thresholds might not provide reliable results. In this study, we used multi-layered perceptron (MLP) neural network to segment rat brain MR images into 3 different regions namely white matter (WM), gray matter (GM) and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF).