An Efficient Optimization Approach for Glioma Tumor Segmentation in Brain MRI

Glioma is an aggressive type of cancer that develops in the brain or spinal cord. Due to many differences in its shape and appearance, accurate segmentation of glioma for identifying all parts of the tumor and its surrounding cancerous tissues is a challenging task. In recent researches, the combination of multi-atlas segmentation and machine learning methods provides robust and accurate results by learning from annotated atlas datasets. To overcome the side effects of limited existing information on atlas-based segmentation, and the long training phase of learning methods, we proposed a semi-supervised unified framework for multi-label segmentation that formulates this problem in terms of a Markov Random Field energy optimization on a parametric graph. To evaluate the proposed framework, we apply it to publicly available BRATS datasets, including low- and high-grade glioma tumors. Experimental results indicate competitive performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Compared with the top ranked methods, the proposed framework obtains the best dice score for segmenting of "whole tumor" (WT), "tumor core" (TC ) and "enhancing active tumor" (ET) regions. The achieved accuracy is 94[Formula: see text] characterized by the mean dice score. The motivation of using MRF graph is to map the segmentation problem to an optimization model in a graphical environment. Therefore, by defining perfect graph structure and optimum constraints and flows in the continuous max-flow model, the segmentation is performed precisely.