PMC

A selection of manually skull-stripped brain (dashed line). a T1w—cerebral calcinosis diagnosis. b GAD— astrocytoma diagnosis

a The irrational 5 × 5 mask with the weights of gray-level values marked. b Original image belonging to WBA dataset. c Filtering result by using the proposed irrational mask

Results of the proposed method for images from the studied databases a IBSR, b WBA-T1w, c WBA-GAD, and d WBA-PD. Columns show the following: original image (1), pre-processed image using the irrational filter (2), binary image obtained in the proposed approach (3), intermediate binary mask (4), and skull-stripped image (5)

The flow diagram of the proposed algorithm. The proposed irrational mask for filtration and an average filter (used in [–]) are applied. The awarded binarization methods [–] and the proposed method provide the intermediate mask. Then, to obtain the final refined mask, some morphological operations are employed for shape correction. The result is the final binary brain mask. Further, in the reconstruction component, the fused brain mask/skull-stripped image is provided

Examples of skull stripping using various binarization methods. a Otsu’s, b Sauvola’s, c Niblack’s, d Bernsen’s, and e proposed methods using the 3 × 3 mask and f proposed method using the 5 × 5 mask. The first column indicates the binary image resulted in the pre-segmentation step. The second column shows the filtering results of the average filter (used in [–]) and of the proposed irrational mask coupled with the shape corrections by morphological operations. The third column corresponds to the skull-stripped image