A New Image Segmentation Method based on Three-Dimensional Neural Network

In this paper, a three-dimensional probabilistic approach for MR brain image segmentation is proposed. Based on the noise-free representative reference vectors provided by SOM, the results of the 3D-PNN method are superior to other traditional algorithms. In addition to the 3D-PNN architecture, a fast three-step training method is proposed. The proposed approach also incorporates structure tensor to find appropriate feature sets for the 3D-PNN with respect to resulting classification accuracy. Computational results with simulated MR brain images have shown the promising performance of the proposed method.