Expectation–maximization (EM) algorithm has been extensively applied in brain MR image segmentation. However, the conventional EM method usually leads to severe misclassifications MR images with bias field, due to the significant intensity inhomogeneity. It limits the applications of the conventional EM method in MR image segmentation. In this paper, we proposed an interleaved EM method to perform tissue segmentation and bias field estimation. In the proposed method, the tissue segmentation is performed by the modified EM classification, and the bias field estimation is accomplished by an energy minimization. Moreover, the tissue segmentation and bias field estimation are performed in an interleaved process, and the two processes potentially benefit from each other during the iteration. A salient advantage of the proposed method is that it overcomes the misclassifications from the conventional EM classification for the MR images with bias field. Furthermore, the modified EM algorithm performs the soft segmentation in our method, which is more suitable for MR images than the hard segmentation achieved in Li et al.'s12 method. We have tested our method in the synthetic images with different levels of bias field and different noise, and compared with two baseline methods. Experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed algorithm.
