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Published in: International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery 2/2017

Open Access 01-02-2017 | Original Article

Automated brain tumour detection and segmentation using superpixel-based extremely randomized trees in FLAIR MRI

Authors: Mohammadreza Soltaninejad, Guang Yang, Tryphon Lambrou, Nigel Allinson, Timothy L. Jones, Thomas R. Barrick, Franklyn A. Howe, Xujiong Ye

Published in: International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery | Issue 2/2017

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Abstract

Purpose

We propose a fully automated method for detection and segmentation of the abnormal tissue associated with brain tumour (tumour core and oedema) from Fluid- Attenuated Inversion Recovery (FLAIR) Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI).

Methods

The method is based on superpixel technique and classification of each superpixel. A number of novel image features including intensity-based, Gabor textons, fractal analysis and curvatures are calculated from each superpixel within the entire brain area in FLAIR MRI to ensure a robust classification. Extremely randomized trees (ERT) classifier is compared with support vector machine (SVM) to classify each superpixel into tumour and non-tumour.

Results

The proposed method is evaluated on two datasets: (1) Our own clinical dataset: 19 MRI FLAIR images of patients with gliomas of grade II to IV, and (2) BRATS 2012 dataset: 30 FLAIR images with 10 low-grade and 20 high-grade gliomas. The experimental results demonstrate the high detection and segmentation performance of the proposed method using ERT classifier. For our own cohort, the average detection sensitivity, balanced error rate and the Dice overlap measure for the segmented tumour against the ground truth are 89.48 %, 6 % and 0.91, respectively, while, for the BRATS dataset, the corresponding evaluation results are 88.09 %, 6 % and 0.88, respectively.

Conclusions

This provides a close match to expert delineation across all grades of glioma, leading to a faster and more reproducible method of brain tumour detection and delineation to aid patient management.
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Metadata
Title
Automated brain tumour detection and segmentation using superpixel-based extremely randomized trees in FLAIR MRI
Authors
Mohammadreza Soltaninejad
Guang Yang
Tryphon Lambrou
Nigel Allinson
Timothy L. Jones
Thomas R. Barrick
Franklyn A. Howe
Xujiong Ye
Publication date
01-02-2017
Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Published in
International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery / Issue 2/2017
Print ISSN: 1861-6410
Electronic ISSN: 1861-6429
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-016-1483-3

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