Skull stripping

In neuroimaging, images are typically acquired in vivo or in situ, i.e. with the brain inside the head of a living or dead subject. To analyze the brain separately, its share of the image has to be "peeled off" from the surrounding tissue, mainly the skull, skin and muscles of the head. This process is commonly referred to as skull stripping or brain extraction and represents an application of image segmentation techniques specifically to the vertebrate head. Both terms (and particularly the second) also have older uses, referring to the physical extraction of brain tissue from the head, as is common in anatomical dissections.