Unsupervised Medical Image Segmentation Based on the Local Center of Mass

Abstract

Image segmentation is a critical step in numerous medical imaging studies, which can be facilitated by automatic computational techniques. Supervised methods, although highly effective, require large training datasets of manually labeled images that are labor-intensive to produce. Unsupervised methods, on the contrary, can be used in the absence of training data to segment new images. We introduce a new approach to unsupervised image segmentation that is based on the computation of the local center of mass. We propose an efficient method to group the pixels of a one-dimensional signal, which we then use in an iterative algorithm for two- and three-dimensional image segmentation. We validate our method on a 2D X-ray image, a 3D abdominal magnetic resonance (MR) image and a dataset of 3D cardiovascular MR images.