Automatic multiple sclerosis lesion segmentation with P-LOCUS

P-LOCUS provides automatic quantitative neuroimaging bio-marker extraction tools to aid diagnosis, prognosis and follow-up in multiple sclerosis studies. The software performs accurate and precise seg-mentation of multiple sclerosis lesions in a multi-stage process. In the first step, a weighted Gaussian tissue model is used to perform a robust segmentation. The algorithm avails of complementary information from multiple MR sequences, and includes additional estimated weight variables to account for the relative importance of each voxel. These estimated weights are used to define candidate lesion voxels that are not well described by a normal tissue model. In the second step, the candidate le-sion regions are used to populate the weighted Gaussian model and guide convergence to an optimal solution. The segmentation is unsupervised, removing the need for a training dataset, and providing independence from specific scanner type and MRI scanner protocol.