title: A novel content-based active contour model for brain tumor segmentation.
abstract: Brain tumor segmentation is a crucial step in surgical and treatment planning. Intensity-based active contour models such as gradient vector flow (GVF), magneto static active contour (MAC) and fluid vector flow (FVF) have been proposed to segment homogeneous objects/tumors in medical images. In this study, extensive experiments are done to analyze the performance of intensity-based techniques for homogeneous tumors on brain magnetic resonance (MR) images. The analysis shows that the state-of-art methods fail to segment homogeneous tumors against similar background or when these tumors show partial diversity toward the background. They also have preconvergence problem in case of false edges/saddle points. However, the presence of weak edges and diffused edges (due to edema around the tumor) leads to oversegmentation by intensity-based techniques. Therefore, the proposed method content-based active contour (CBAC) uses both intensity and texture information present within the active contour to overcome above-stated problems capturing large range in an image. It also proposes a novel use of Gray-Level Co-occurrence Matrix to define texture space for tumor segmentation. The effectiveness of this method is tested on two different real data sets (55 patients - more than 600 images) containing five different types of homogeneous, heterogeneous, diffused tumors and synthetic images (non-MR benchmark images). Remarkable results are obtained in segmenting homogeneous tumors of uniform intensity, complex content heterogeneous, diffused tumors on MR images (T1-weighted, postcontrast T1-weighted and T2-weighted) and synthetic images (non-MR benchmark images of varying intensity, texture, noise content and false edges). Further, tumor volume is efficiently extracted from 2-dimensional slices and is named as 2.5-dimensional segmentation.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, India. jainysachdeva@gmail.com
authors.forename: Jainy
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Sachdeva
authors.forename: Vinod
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Kumar
authors.forename: Indra
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Gupta
authors.forename: Niranjan
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Khandelwal
authors.forename: Chirag Kamal
authors.initials: CK
authors.lastname: Ahuja
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001921:Brain / Q000473:pathology*; D001932:Brain Neoplasms / Q000473:pathology*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D006801:Humans; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods*; D008954:Models, Biological; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated / Q000379:methods*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity