Single seed delineation of brain tumor using multi-thresholding

Brain MR Image Multilevel Thresholding by Using Particle Swarm Optimization, Otsu Method and Anisotropic Diffusion

Multilevel thresholding is widely used in brain magnetic resonance (MR) image segmentation. In this article, a multilevel thresholding-based brain MR image segmentation technique is proposed. The image is first filtered using anisotropic diffusion. Then multilevel thresholding based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) is performed on the filtered image to get the final segmented image. Otsu function is used to select the thresholds. The proposed technique is compared with standard PSO and bacterial foraging optimization (BFO) based multilevel thresholding techniques. The objective image quality metrics such as Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Mean Structural SIMilarity (MSSIM) index are used to evaluate the quality of the segmented images. The experimental results suggest that the proposed technique gives significantly better-quality image segmentation compared to the other techniques when applied to T2-weitghted brain MR images.

Trends in DNN Model Based Classification and Segmentation of Brain Tumor Detection

Background:

Due to the complexities of scrutinizing and diagnosing brain tumors from MR images, brain tumor analysis has become one of the most indispensable concerns. Characterization of a brain tumor before any treatment, such as radiotherapy, requires decisive treatment planning and accurate implementation. As a result, early detection of brain tumors is imperative for better clinical outcomes and subsequent patient survival.

Introduction:

Brain tumor segmentation is a crucial task in medical image analysis. Because of tumor heterogeneity and varied intensity patterns, manual segmentation takes a long time, limiting the use of accurate quantitative interventions in clinical practice. Automated computer-based brain tumor image processing has become more valuable with technological advancement. With various imaging and statistical analysis tools, deep learning algorithms offer a viable option to enable health care practitioners to rule out the disease and estimate the growth.

Methods:

This article presents a comprehensive evaluation of conventional machine learning models as well as evolving deep learning techniques for brain tumor segmentation and classification.

Conclusion:

In this manuscript, a hierarchical review has been presented for brain tumor segmentation and detection. It is found that the segmentation methods hold a wide margin of improvement in the context of the implementation of adaptive thresholding and segmentation methods, the feature training and mapping requires redundancy correction, the input data training needs to be more exhaustive and the detection algorithms are required to be robust in terms of handling online input data analysis/tumor detection.

Confidence Region Identification and Contour Detection in MRI Image

Tumour region extraction (RE) method identifies the area of interest in MR imaging as it also highlights tumour boundaries. Some other intensities are existing, they are not visible but have their existence in region, and this region is called growing region. Such region is to be tumour region. Due to the variation of intensities in MRI images, tumour visibility becomes uncleared. Tumour intensity variations (tumour tissues) mix with normal brain tissues. In the light of above circumstance, tumour growing region becomes challenge. The goal of work is to extract the region of interest with confidence. The objective of the study is to develop the region of interest of brain tumour MRI image method by using confidence score for identifying the variation of intensity. The significance of work is based on identification of region of interest (tumour region). Confidence score is measured through pattern of intensities of MRI image. Similar patterns of brain tumour intensities are identified. Each pattern of intensities is adjusted with certain scale, and then biggest blob is analysed. Various biggest area blobs are combined, and resultant biggest blob is formed. In fact, resultant area blob is a combination of different patterns. Each pattern is assigned with particular colour. These colours highlight the growing region. Further, a contour is detected around the tumour boundaries. With combination of region scale fitting and contour detection (CD), tumour boundaries are further separated from normal tissues. Hence, the confidence score (CS) is formed from CD. CS is further converted to confidence region (CR). Conversion to CR is performed though confidence interval (CI). CI is based on defined conditions. In such conditions, different probabilities are considered. Probability identifies the region. Source of region formation is pixels; these pixels highlight tumour core significantly. This CR is obtained through checking standard deviation and statistical evaluation using confidence interval. Hence, region-of-interest pixels are identifying the CR. CR is evaluated through 97% Dice over index (DOI), 94% Jacquard, MSE 1.24, and PSNR 17.45. Value of testing parameter from benchmark study was JI, DOI, and MSE, PSNR : JI was 31.5%, DOI was 47.3%, MSE was 2.5 dB, and PSNR was 40 dB. The parameters are measured for the complex images; contribution parameter classifies the mean pixel values and deviating pixel values, and the classification of the pixel value is like to be termed as intensities. Mentioned classification extracts the variation of intensity pixels accurately; then, algorithm is highlighting the region as compared to the normal tumour cells.

Review on Hybrid Segmentation Methods for Identification of Brain Tumor in MRI

Modalities like MRI give information about organs and highlight diseases. Organ information is visualized in intensities. The segmentation method plays an important role in the identification of the region of interest (ROI). The ROI can be segmented from the image using clustering, features, and region extraction. Segmentation can be performed in steps; firstly, the region is extracted from the image. Secondly, feature extraction performed, and better features are selected. They can be shape, texture, or intensity. Thirdly, clustering segments the shape of tumor, tumor has specified shape, and shape is detected by feature. Clustering consists of FCM, K-means, FKM, and their hybrid. To support the segmentation, we conducted three studies (region extraction, feature, and clustering) which are discussed in the first line of this review paper. All these studies are targeting MRI as a modality. MRI visualization proved to be more accurate for the identification of diseases compared with other modalities. Information of the modality is compromised due to low pass image. In MRI Images, the tumor intensities are variable in tumor areas as well as in tumor boundaries.

A transfer learning based deep learning model to diagnose covid-19 CT scan images

To save the life of human beings during the pandemic conditions we need an effective automated method to deal with this situation. In pandemic conditions when the available resources becomes insufficient to handle the patient’s load, then we needed some fast and reliable method which analyse the patient medical data with high efficiency and accuracy within time limitations. In this manuscript, an effective and efficient method is proposed for exact diagnosis of the patient whether it is coronavirus disease-2019 (covid-19) positive or negative with the help of deep learning. To find the correct diagnosis with high accuracy we use pre-processed segmented images for the analysis with deep learning. In the first step the X-ray image or computed tomography (CT) of a covid-19 infected person is analysed with various schemes of image segmentation like simple thresholding at 0.3, simple thresholding at 0.6, multiple thresholding (between 26–230) and Otsu’s algorithm. On comparative analysis of all these methods, it is found that the Otsu’s algorithm is a simple and optimum scheme to improve the segmented outcome of binary image for the diagnosis point of view. Otsu’s segmentation scheme gives more precise values in comparison to other methods on the scale of various image quality parameters like accuracy, sensitivity, f-measure, precision, and specificity. For image classification here we use Resnet-50, MobileNet and VGG-16 models of deep learning which gives accuracy 70.24%, 72.95% and 83.18% respectively with non-segmented CT scan images and 75.08%, 80.12% and 99.28% respectively with Otsu’s segmented CT scan images. On a comparative study we find that the VGG-16 models with CT scan image segmented with Otsu’s segmentation gives very high accuracy of 99.28%. On the basis of the diagnosis of the patient firstly we go for an arterial blood gas (ABG) analysis and then on the behalf of this diagnosis and ABG report, the severity level of the patient can be decided and according to this severity level, proper treatment protocols can be followed immediately to save the patient's life. Compared with the existing works, our deep learning based novel method reduces the complexity, takes much less time and has a greater accuracy for exact diagnosis of coronavirus disease-2019 (covid-19).

Quantitative imaging of apoptosis following oncolytic virotherapy by magnetic resonance fingerprinting aided by deep learning

Non-invasive imaging methods for detecting intratumoural viral spread and host responses to oncolytic virotherapy are either slow, lack specificity or require the use of radioactive or metal-based contrast agents. Here we show that in mice with glioblastoma multiforme, the early apoptotic responses to oncolytic virotherapy (characterized by decreased cytosolic pH and reduced protein synthesis) can be rapidly detected via chemical-exchange-saturation-transfer magnetic resonance fingerprinting (CEST-MRF) aided by deep learning. By leveraging a deep neural network trained with simulated magnetic resonance fingerprints, CEST-MRF can generate quantitative maps of intratumoural pH and of protein and lipid concentrations by selectively labelling the exchangeable amide protons of endogenous proteins and the exchangeable macromolecule protons of lipids, without requiring exogenous contrast agents. We also show that in a healthy volunteer, CEST-MRF yielded molecular parameters that are in good agreement with values from the literature. Deep-learning-aided CEST-MRF may also be amenable to the characterization of host responses to other cancer therapies and to the detection of cardiac and neurological pathologies.

Brain Tumor Segmentation From Multi-Modal MR Images via Ensembling UNets

Glioma is a type of severe brain tumor, and its accurate segmentation is useful in surgery planning and progression evaluation. Based on different biological properties, the glioma can be divided into three partially-overlapping regions of interest, including whole tumor (WT), tumor core (TC), and enhancing tumor (ET). Recently, UNet has identified its effectiveness in automatically segmenting brain tumor from multi-modal magnetic resonance (MR) images. In this work, instead of network architecture, we focus on making use of prior knowledge (brain parcellation), training and testing strategy (joint 3D+2D), ensemble and post-processing to improve the brain tumor segmentation performance. We explore the accuracy of three UNets with different inputs, and then ensemble the corresponding three outputs, followed by post-processing to achieve the final segmentation. Similar to most existing works, the first UNet uses 3D patches of multi-modal MR images as the input. The second UNet uses brain parcellation as an additional input. And the third UNet is inputted by 2D slices of multi-modal MR images, brain parcellation, and probability maps of WT, TC, and ET obtained from the second UNet. Then, we sequentially unify the WT segmentation from the third UNet and the fused TC and ET segmentation from the first and the second UNets as the complete tumor segmentation. Finally, we adopt a post-processing strategy by labeling small ET as non-enhancing tumor to correct some false-positive ET segmentation. On one publicly-available challenge validation dataset (BraTS2018), the proposed segmentation pipeline yielded average Dice scores of 91.03/86.44/80.58% and average 95% Hausdorff distances of 3.76/6.73/2.51 mm for WT/TC/ET, exhibiting superior segmentation performance over other state-of-the-art methods. We then evaluated the proposed method on the BraTS2020 training data through five-fold cross validation, with similar performance having also been observed. The proposed method was finally evaluated on 10 in-house data, the effectiveness of which has been established qualitatively by professional radiologists.

Novel Volumetric Sub-region Segmentation in Brain Tumors

A novel deep learning based model called Multi-Planar Spatial Convolutional Neural Network (MPS-CNN) is proposed for effective, automated segmentation of different sub-regions viz. peritumoral edema (ED), necrotic core (NCR), enhancing and non-enhancing tumor core (ET/NET), from multi-modal MR images of the brain. An encoder-decoder type CNN model is designed for pixel-wise segmentation of the tumor along three anatomical planes (axial, sagittal, and coronal) at the slice level. These are then combined, by incorporating a consensus fusion strategy with a fully connected Conditional Random Field (CRF) based post-refinement, to produce the final volumetric segmentation of the tumor and its constituent sub-regions. Concepts, such as spatial-pooling and unpooling are used to preserve the spatial locations of the edge pixels, for reducing segmentation error around the boundaries. A new aggregated loss function is also developed for effectively handling data imbalance. The MPS-CNN is trained and validated on the recent Multimodal Brain Tumor Segmentation Challenge (BraTS) 2018 dataset. The Dice scores obtained for the validation set for whole tumor (WT :NCR/NE +ET +ED), tumor core (TC:NCR/NET +ET), and enhancing tumor (ET) are 0.90216, 0.87247, and 0.82445. The proposed MPS-CNN is found to perform the best (based on leaderboard scores) for ET and TC segmentation tasks, in terms of both the quantitative measures (viz. Dice and Hausdorff). In case of the WT segmentation it also achieved the second highest accuracy, with a score which was only 1% less than that of the best performing method.

Brain MR Image Multilevel Thresholding by Using Particle Swarm Optimization, Otsu Method and Anisotropic Diffusion

Multilevel thresholding is widely used in brain magnetic resonance (MR) image segmentation. In this article, a multilevel thresholding-based brain MR image segmentation technique is proposed. The image is first filtered using anisotropic diffusion. Then multilevel thresholding based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) is performed on the filtered image to get the final segmented image. Otsu function is used to select the thresholds. The proposed technique is compared with standard PSO and bacterial foraging optimization (BFO) based multilevel thresholding techniques. The objective image quality metrics such as Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Mean Structural SIMilarity (MSSIM) index are used to evaluate the quality of the segmented images. The experimental results suggest that the proposed technique gives significantly better-quality image segmentation compared to the other techniques when applied to T2-weitghted brain MR images.

Brain tissue segmentation using improved kernelized rough-fuzzy C-means with spatio-contextual information from MRI

Segmentation of brain tissues from MRI often becomes crucial to properly investigate any region of the brain in order to detect abnormalities. However, the accurate segmentation of the brain tissues is a challenging task as the different tissue regions are usually imprecise, indiscernible, ambiguous, and overlapping. Additionally, different tissue regions are non-linearly separable. Noises and other artifacts may also present in the brain MRI. Therefore, conventional segmentation techniques may not often achieve desired accuracy. To deal those challenges, a robust kernelized rough fuzzy C-means clustering with spatial constraints (KRFCMSC) is proposed in this article for brain tissue segmentation. Here, the brain tissue segmentation from MRI is considered as a clustering of pixels problem. The basic idea behind the proposed technique is the judicious integration of the fuzzy set, rough set, and kernel trick along with spatial constraints (in the form of contextual information) to increase the clustering (segmentation) performance. The use of rough and fuzzy set theory in the clustering process handles the ambiguity, indiscernibility, vagueness and overlappingness of different brain tissue regions. While, the kernel trick increases the chance of linear separability of the complex regions which are otherwise not linearly separable in its original feature space. In order to deal the noisy pixels, here in the clustering process, the spatio-contextual information is introduced from the neighbouring pixels. Experiments are carried out on different real and synthetic benchmark brain MRI datasets (publicly available from Brainweb, and IBSR) without and with added noise. The performance of the proposed method is compared with five other counterpart clustering based segmentation techniques and evaluated using various supervised as well as unsupervised validity indices such as, overall accuracy, precision, recall, kappa, Jaccard, dice, and kernelized Xie-Beni index. Experimental results justify the superiority and robustness of the proposed method over other state-of-the-art methods on both benchmark real life and synthetic brain MRI datasets with and without added noise. Statistical significance of the better segmentation accuracy can be confirmed from the paired t-test results in favour of the proposed method compared to other counterpart methods.