Brain tumor detection using statistical and machine learning method

Abstract

Background and objective: Brain tumor occurs because of anomalous development of cells. It is one of the major reasons of death in adults around the globe. Millions of deaths can be prevented through early detection of brain tumor. Earlier brain tumor detection using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) may increase patient's survival rate. In MRI, tumor is shown more clearly that helps in the process of further treatment. This work aims to detect tumor at an early phase.

Methods: In this manuscript, Weiner filter with different wavelet bands is used to de-noise and enhance the input slices. Subsets of tumor pixels are found with Potential Field (PF) clustering. Furthermore, global threshold and different mathematical morphology operations are used to isolate the tumor region in Fluid Attenuated Inversion Recovery (Flair) and T2 MRI. For accurate classification, Local Binary Pattern (LBP) and Gabor Wavelet Transform (GWT) features are fused.

Results: The proposed approach is evaluated in terms of peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), mean squared error (MSE) and structured similarity index (SSIM) yielding results as 76.38, 0.037 and 0.98 on T2 and 76.2, 0.039 and 0.98 on Flair respectively. The segmentation results have been evaluated based on pixels, individual features and fused features. At pixels level, the comparison of proposed approach is done with ground truth slices and also validated in terms of foreground (FG) pixels, background (BG) pixels, error region (ER) and pixel quality (Q). The approach achieved 0.93 FG and 0.98 BG precision and 0.010 ER on a local dataset. On multimodal brain tumor segmentation challenge dataset BRATS 2013, 0.93 FG and 0.99 BG precision and 0.005 ER are acquired. Similarly on BRATS 2015, 0.97 FG and 0.98 BG precision and 0.015 ER are obtained. In terms of quality, the average Q value and deviation are 0.88 and 0.017. At the fused feature based level, specificity, sensitivity, accuracy, area under the curve (AUC) and dice similarity coefficient (DSC) are 1.00, 0.92, 0.93, 0.96 and 0.96 on BRATS 2013, 0.90, 1.00, 0.97, 0.98 and 0.98 on BRATS 2015 and 0.90, 0.91, 0.90, 0.77 and 0.95 on local dataset respectively.

Conclusion: The presented approach outperformed as compared to existing approaches.

Keywords: Fused features; LBP; PF clustering; Pixel based results; Weiner Filter.