Computer system for quantitative: analysis of ICH from CT head images

A computer-based system for quantitative analysis of the human spontaneous intracerebral brain hemorrhage (ICH) from computed tomography (CT) head images has been developed and presented in this paper. The computer-based system can be used by medical researchers to observe and quantitatively analyze three-dimensional (3D) changes in ICH volume and structure during the course of illness. CT head images are first digitized from films and individual slices are aligned. In the following step, the segmentation of CT images having ICH is performed using a new hybrid method for automatic segmentation. The proposed method has hierarchical structure and is based on unsupervised fuzzy clustering and expert system-based labeling. The hierarchical structure has two levels: the global and the local. The segmented images are interpolated and a quantitative analysis is performed in the final step of the procedure. The quantitative analysis includes the volume measurement of the ICH and the edema regions. The system has been used on a number of CT head scans and performed correct quantitative analysis.