Brain MRI monitoring approach of lesion progress in multiple sclerosis using active contours

Magnetic resonance imaging is considered a powerful tool for the no-invasive diagnosis of brain pathologies. Multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune inflammatory disease of the central nervous system in which clinical markers are used today for diagnosis and for therapeutic evaluation. In order to automate a long and hard process for the clinician, we propose a semi-automatic lesions segmentation approach in longitudinal image sequences. We use firstly a robust algorithm that allows spatiotemporal extraction by the geodesic active contour model. Then, we recommend an original scheme based on an automated image registration technique for evaluating the evolution of the detected lesions. A quantitative study is presented in this paper to validate our results using the 'BrainWeb' simulator, MICCAI2008, and MICCAI2016. Promising results are obtained in the case of clinical data. Our research was tested on ten typical and atypical synthetic motifs and 1,000 MR-images from different centres.