Globally optimal region thresholding based on bimodal Gaussian distribution with physiological constraints : head MR example.

In medical image processing thresholding of the image region is one of the most basic operations and preprocessing. While there are well-proven histogram-based partitioning methods including Otsu and Gaussian Mixture Model ) it is challenging to combine those methods with physiological constraints such as tissue volume ratio or average signal ratio to avoid anatomically invalid segmentation. We propose a new method GOTC when the distribution of the signal over the ROI is described as a bimodal Gaussian of two tissues. We describe the algorithm and validate it on brain MRI segmentation into the White Matter and Gray Matter.