A generalisable head MRI defacing pipeline: Evaluation on 2,566 meningioma scans
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
May 19, 2025
Abstract
Reliable MRI defacing techniques to safeguard patient privacy while
preserving brain anatomy are critical for research collaboration. Existing
methods often struggle with incomplete defacing or degradation of brain tissue
regions. We present a robust, generalisable defacing pipeline for
high-resolution MRI that integrates atlas-based registration with brain
masking. Our method was evaluated on 2,566 heterogeneous clinical scans for
meningioma and achieved a 99.92 per cent success rate (2,564/2,566) upon visual
inspection. Excellent anatomical preservation is demonstrated with a Dice
similarity coefficient of 0.9975 plus or minus 0.0023 between brain masks
automatically extracted from the original and defaced volumes. Source code is
available at https://github.com/cai4cai/defacing_pipeline.
