Several neuroimaging processing applications consider skull stripping as a crucial pre-processing step. Due to complex anatomical brain structure and intensity variations in brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), an appropriate skull stripping is an important part. The process of skull stripping basically deals with the removal of the skull region for clinical analysis in brain segmentation tasks, and its accuracy and efficiency are quite crucial for diagnostic purposes. It requires more accurate and detailed methods for differentiating brain regions and the skull regions and is considered as a challenging task. This paper is focused on the transition of the conventional to the machine- and deep-learning-based automated skull stripping methods for brain MRI images. It is observed in this study that deep learning approaches have outperformed conventional and machine learning techniques in many ways, but they have their limitations. It also includes the comparative analysis of the current state-of-the-art skull stripping methods, a critical discussion of some challenges, model of quantifying parameters, and future work directions.
Keywords: Brain extraction; Conventional skull stripping methods; Deep learning skull stripping methods; MRI; Machine learning skull stripping methods; Skull stripping.