Strategies for the Detection of Focal Lesions in MR Tomograms of the Human Head

Detecting pathological features in magnetic resonance imaging data sets of the human head is considered a non-trivial segmentation task. Segmentation approaches require prior knowledge about the lesion characteristics (e.g., their expected compartment, size and shape, their signal statistics in relation to the embedding tissue), and thus, are generally targeted for detecting a specific lesion type. We focus on approaches that are targeted to automatically detect (a) large unilateral lesions, (b) small multifocal lesions, and (c) diffuse white matter lesions. While a trained human observer still outperforms autom…