Brain tumor segmentation from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans is critical for the diagnosis, treatment planning, and monitoring of therapeutic outcomes. Thus, this research introduces a novel hybrid approach that combines handcrafted features with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to enhance the performance of brain tumor segmentation. In this study, handcrafted features were extracted from MRI scans that included intensity-based, texture-based, and shape-based features. In parallel, a unique CNN architecture was developed and trained to detect the features from the data automatically. The proposed hybrid method was combined with the handcrafted features and the features identified by CNN in different pathways to a new CNN. In this study, the Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) challenge dataset was used to measure the performance using a variety of assessment measures, for instance, segmentation accuracy, dice score, sensitivity, and specificity. The achieved results showed that our proposed approach outperformed the traditional handcrafted feature-based and individual CNN-based methods used for brain tumor segmentation. In addition, the incorporation of handcrafted features enhanced the performance of CNN, yielding a more robust and generalizable solution. This research has significant potential for real-world clinical applications where precise and efficient brain tumor segmentation is essential. Future research directions include investigating alternative feature fusion techniques and incorporating additional imaging modalities to further improve the proposed method's performance.
Keywords: brain tumor; computational approaches; feature fusion; handcrafted features; hybrid approach; optimization methods; segmentation.