A common procedure performed by many groups in the analysis of neuroimaging data is separating the brain from other
tissues. This procedure is often utilized both by volumetric studies as well as functional imaging studies. Regardless of
the intent, an accurate, robust method of identifying the brain or cranial vault is imperative. While this is a common
requirement, there are relatively few tools to perform this task. Most of these tools require a T1 weighted image and are
therefore not able to accurately define a region that includes surface CSF. In this paper, we have developed a novel brain
extraction technique termed Maximize Uniformity by Summation Heuristic (MUSH) optimization. The algorithm was
designed for extraction of the brain and surface CSF from a multi-modal magnetic resonance (MR) imaging study. The
method forms a linear combination of multi-modal MR imaging data to make the signal intensity within the brain as
uniform as possible. The resulting image is thresholded and simple morphological operators are utilized to generate the
resulting representation of the brain. The resulting method was applied to a sample of 20 MR brain scans and compared
to the results generated by 3dSkullStrip, 3dIntracranial, BET, and BET2. The average Jaccard metrics for the twenty
subjects was 0.66 (BET), 0.61 (BET2), 0.88 (3dIntracranial), 0.91 (3dSkullStrip), and 0.94 (MUSH).
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