MBIS: Multivariate Bayesian Image Segmentation tool

We present MBIS (Multivariate Bayesian Image Segmentation tool), a clustering tool based on the mixture of multivariate normal distributions model. MBIS supports multichannel bias field correction based on a B-spline model. A second methodological novelty is the inclusion of graph-cuts optimization for the stationary anisotropic hidden Markov random field model. Along with MBIS, we release an evaluation framework that contains three different experiments on multi-site data. We first validate the accuracy of segmentation and the estimated bias field for each channel. MBIS outperforms a widely used segmentation tool in a cross-comparison evaluation. The second experiment demonstrates the robustness of results on atlas-free segmentation of two image sets from scan-rescan protocols on 21 healthy subjects. Multivariate segmentation is more replicable than the monospectral counterpart on T1-weighted images. Finally, we provide a third experiment to illustrate how MBIS can be used in a large-scale study of tissue volume change with increasing age in 584 healthy subjects. This last result is meaningful as multivariate segmentation performs robustly without the need for prior knowledge. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.