A Fully Automated White Matter / Gray Matter Segmentation of Mice Spinal Cord on DTI Images

Michal Sdika¹, Virginie Callot¹, Mathias Hebert¹, Guillaume Duhamel¹, Patrick J. Cozzone¹

In this work, a fully automated method is proposed to segment mice SC white matter (WM) and gray matter (GM) tissues on Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) images. The proposed method is based on three main step: first a small patch containing the SC is detected using a machine learning procedure, then a mask of the SC is computed within this patch and finally WM/GM segmentation is performed. Specific attention has been paid to choose an appropriate modality for each steps. The segmentation results has been evaluated by visual assessment by two experts on the images of 13 mice.