  In this paper we propose a novel method for the segmentation of longitudinal
brain MRI scans of patients suffering from Multiple Sclerosis. The method
builds upon an existing cross-sectional method for simultaneous whole-brain and
lesion segmentation, introducing subject-specific latent variables to encourage
temporal consistency between longitudinal scans. It is very generally
applicable, as it does not make any prior assumptions on the scanner, the MRI
protocol, or the number and timing of longitudinal follow-up scans. Preliminary
experiments on three longitudinal datasets indicate that the proposed method
produces more reliable segmentations and detects disease effects better than
the cross-sectional method it is based upon.
