Brain MRI Segmentation for Focal Cortical Dysplasia Lesion Detection

Ivana Despotovic¹, Ief Segers¹, Ljiljana Platisa¹, Ewout Vansteenkiste¹, Aleksandra Pizurica¹, Karel Deblaere², Wilfried Philips¹

Focal cortical dysplasia (FCD) is a major cause of refractory epilepsy and is characterized with subtle brain lesions. Identification of FCD lesions using MRI scans is the first and most difficult step in medical treatments. Most of the existing FCD detection algorithms are based on cortical thickness measurement, which requires brain MRI segmentation. In this work, we propose an improved technique for 3D brain MRI segmentation based on graph cuts algorithm. The performance of our algorithm is validated on both phantom and real patient MRI. Experimental results show that our method is effective and successfully indicates the FCD lesions.