Techniques for MRI Brain Tumor

Detection: A Survey
Vipin Das and Jisha Rajan
Department of Computer Science, Saintgits College of Engineering, Kottayam, India

International Journal of Research in Computer Applications & Information Technology

Volume 4, Issue 3, May-June, 2016, pp. 53-56
ISSN Online: 2347-5099, Print: 2348-0009, DOA : 02032016
© IASTER 2016, www.iaster.com

ABSTRACT
Brain magnetic resonance (MR) image segmentation is a very important and challenging task needed
for the diagnosis of brain tumors and other neurological diseases. The brain tumor is an abnormal
growth of cells in the brain that multiplies in an abnormal and uncontrollable way. The detection of
brain tumor is a challenging task due to complexity in the structure of brain. Accurate segmentation
of brain tissues is very important and critical for the correct diagnosis of tumors. In this paper
various techniques used to detect the tumor in human brain using MRI images has been surveyed.

Keywords: Brain Tumor, Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI), Segmentation.

I. INTRODUCTION
Image segmentation is an active field in medical imaging. Its purpose is to divide an image into regions
which are meaningful for a particular task [1]. It is the partition of an image into meaningful regions to
distinguish objects or regions of interest according to one or more characteristics or features and enhancing
areas of interest by separating them from the background. The primary goal of segmentation is to simplify
or change the representation of an image into something more meaningful and easier to analyze.
Brain tumors are classified based on the type of tissue and the location of the tumor. They have
different characteristics such as size, shape, location and image intensities. They may deform
neighboring structures and if there is edema with the tumor, intensity properties of the nearby region
will change. Brain tumors can be benign or malignant. Benign tumors are noncancerous and usually
have an evident border or edge. However, they can cause serious health problems. Malignant brain
tumors consist of rapid growing cancerous cells and invade to the surrounding healthy brain tissues.
Surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy are available treatments for brain tumor.
In the field of medical image processing, MRI is a good soft tissue contrast imaging modality
particularly suitable for brain studies which is also non-invasive. It provides valuable information
about shape, size, and localization of brain tumors without exposing the patient to a high ionization
radiation. Manual segmentation of brain MR images is a time consuming and tiring process that can
show differences when performed by different experts [2]. Robust computerized segmentation
algorithms can help physicians to analyze and diagnose diseases of the brain by examining tissues and
structures in a quantitative manner .The segmentation process is to extract abnormal brain tissues such
as active tumor, necrosis and edema from the normal brain tissues such as white matter (WM), gray
matter (GM) and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) [3]. Segmentation of the tissues of the brain, especially
tumor and edema is a quite difficult task because of the non-homogeneous intensity distribution,
background noise, complex shape, unclear boundaries, and low intensity contrast between adjacent
brain tissues [4].There have been many different techniques proposed for the segmentation of MR
brain images due to the inherent difficulty and quantification of the brain tissues.

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Technology, Volume-4, Issue-3, May-June, 2016, www.iaster.com (P) 2348-0009

II. MATERIALS AND METHODS

Demirhan. A et al. [3] presented an unsupervised approach to segment brain MR images into healthy tissues
such as GM, WM, and CSF along with the diseased tissues, tumor, and edema. They developed an algorithm
for stripping the skull using threshold and morphological operations. Stationary Wavelet Transform (SWT) is
used to decompose images into sub bands and performed spatial filtering methods on these sub bands to
obtain feature vector that will be used as input to the Self-Organizing Map (SOM). Segmentation operation is
performed by an unsupervised SOM network. They developed an algorithm, based on the hit histograms of
the Best Matching Units (BMUs) of the output neurons for clustering the SOM instead of using an additional
NN. Supervised LVQ algorithm is used to calibrate the output neurons of the SOM. They used Dice
similarity index, sensitivity and specificity to evaluate the performance of the developed algorithm. The
statistical analysis of the experimental results has indicated that the developed algorithm can segment brain
MR images with good accuracy. Their overall procedure can segment WM, GM, CSF, tumor, and edema
from MR images .They have compared their method with the other state-of-the-art brain MR segmentation
methods with BRATS2012 dataset and showed a moderate and comparable performance on this dataset.

Easha Noureen, Dr. Md. Kamrul Hassan [5] proposed a Histogram Thresholding segmentation
method for detecting the brain tumor in MRI image. This method is based on thresholding of
histogram features and gray level thresholding. An image with region or object of uniform brightness
placed against a background of different gray level is used. To segment the object and background, a
proper threshold must be applied. Histogram presents the intensity values of an image and the
thresholding is a technique for converting the grayscale or color image into a binary image based on
threshold values. The brain MRI image is divided into different parts and the histogram of each part is
drawn. Threshold point of the histogram is calculated and the segmentation is done using that
threshold point for both the halves. Bar graph is used to plot the histogram. The two histogram
differences are calculated and the resultant difference is plotted using bar graph to select the threshold
point. The obtained result provides great importance in detecting the brain tumor in MRI image.
Hooda et al. [6] paper deals with the performance analysis of image segmentation techniques such as
K-Means Clustering, Fuzzy C-Means Clustering and Region Growing for detection of brain tumor.
They proposed a framework for an automatic brain tumor detection and segmentation. The designed
system consists of two main components: pre-processing and segmentation. The problems like
intensity inhomogeneity correction, background noise removal are done in the pre-processing section
and also the non brain tissues such as skull and fat from head MRI scans are also removed. The
second component of the framework is segmentation in which the tumor is detected using image
registration, tumor extraction and tumor mapping techniques. In this paper, performance evaluation of
the above mentioned techniques is done based on error percentage as compared to ground truth. After
comparing all the three methods it was concluded that the error percentage value was lowest with
FCM clustering and it outperforms other segmentation algorithm.
Nandagopal and Rajamony [7] in their paper used a combination of wavelet statistical features (WST)
and wavelet co-occurrence texture feature (WCT) obtained from two level discrete wavelet transform
for feature extraction in the study of tumor detection. The proposed system consists of four phases:
segmentation of region of interest, discrete wavelet decomposition, feature extraction and feature
selection and classification and evaluation. The support vector machine (SVM) is employed for brain
tumor segmentation. Genetic algorithm is used to select the optimal texture features from the set of
extracted features. The probabilistic neural network is used to classify abnormal brain tissue in to benign
and malignant and the performance evaluation is done by comparing the classification result of PNN
with other neural network classifier. The classification accuracy of the proposed system is 97.5%.

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Technology, Volume-4, Issue-3, May-June, 2016, www.iaster.com (P) 2348-0009

Zhang et al. [8] presented a neural network based method to classify a given MR brain image into
normal or abnormal. This method first employs a wavelet transform to extract feature from image and
then applies the principal component analysis (PCA) technique to reduce the dimensions of features.
The reduced features send through back to back propagation neural network, with which scaled
conjugate radiant (SCG) is adopted to find the optimal weight of neural network. The classification
accuracy of both training and test image are 100%.

Sumitra and Saxena [9] presented a neural network technique for the classification of magnetic
resonance brain images which consists of 3 stages: feature extraction, dimensionality reduction and
classification. The feature extraction is done using PCA from MR images and essential features such
as mean, median, variance, correlation values of maximum and minimum intensity are extracted. In
the classification stage, the classifier based on back propagation in neural network has been
developed. This classifier classifies the image as normal, benign and malignant. The result shows that
the BPN classifier gives fast and accurate classification than any other neural network classifier. The
classification accuracy of testing data set of brain image is 73%.

Jafari and Shafaghi [10] presented a hybrid approach for the detection of brain tumor in MRI image
based on genetic algorithm and support vector machine. The proposed system consists of 4 stages. In the
first stage pre-processing, noise removal and contrast enhancement is done. The second stage is
segmentation in which the skull stripping is done with the help of morphological operations. The third
stage is feature selection and extraction. Feature selection is done based on 4 categories which are static
features, Fourier and wavelet transforms histogram and the combination of prior set. Feature selection is
done by the use of genetic algorithm. In the fourth stage, the selected features are fed as input to the
support vector machine classifier to detect abnormal brain tissue with an accuracy of 83.22%. The
limitation of this work is that wavelet transform requires large storage and high computational.
El-Dahshan et al. [11] presents a hybrid technique for the classification of Magnetic Resonance Images
(MRI). The proposed method consists of three stages: feature extraction, dimensionality reduction and
classification. Feature extraction by Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is done in the first stage. In the
second stage, the feature of Magnetic Resonance Image has been reduced by using Principal Component
Analysis (PCA). Two classifiers have been developed in the classification stage. The first classifier is based
on feed forward back propagation artificial neural network (FP-ANN) and the second classifiers have been
used to classify subjects as normal or abnormal MRI brain image. Using FP-ANN and K-NN, a classification
of 97% and 98% has been obtained respectively. From the result obtained it is concluded that the proposed
technique is robust and effective compared with other recent work. The limitation of this work is that
whenever there is a change in the image database it requires fresh training each time.
Parisot et al. [12] explained a new technique for detection, segmentation and characterization of brain
tumor. This process exploits previous information in the structure of an extra graph on behalf of the
predictable spatial positions of tumor classes. Such information is as well as picture based
categorization techniques alongside spatial smoothness constraints towards producing a regular
recognition map inside a united graphical model formulation. Towards most favorable use of prior
information, a two layer organized graph is measured with one layer equal to the low-grade glioma
type (description) and another layer to voxel based decisions of tumor occurrence. Proficient linear
programming together in conditions of performance in addition to in terms of computational load is
considered to recuperate the cheapest potential of the objective purpose.
J. Selvakumar et al. [13] paper proposed an implementation of Simple Cluster Algorithm for detection of
range and shape of tumor in brain MRI. The method shows that if tumor has a mass then K means
algorithm is enough to extract it from the brain cells. If there is any presence of noise in the MR image, it is

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International Journal of Research in Computer Applications & Information (O) 2347-5099
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Technology, Volume-4, Issue-3, May-June, 2016, www.iaster.com (P) 2348-0009

removed before the K means process. The noise free image is an input to the K means and tumor is
extracted from the MRI image followed by segmentation using Fuzzy C means for accurate tumor shape
extraction. Thresholding is used as a last stage for feature extraction at the output. At the end of the
method, tumor is extracted from the MR image and its exact position and the shape is determined and the
tumor’s stage is estimated based on the amount of area calculated from the cluster. The experimental
results were compared with other algorithms and the proposed method is more accurate was proved. The
future work includes 3D assessment of brain using 3D slicers can be developed with matlab.

III. CONCLUSION
In this paper we have accomplished a partial survey of various methods for the detection and
classification of brain tumor from MRI image. We have presented the review of different brain image
segmentation methods. The diagnosis of tumor is a complicated and sensitive task so that accuracy
and reliability are always assigned much importance. Hence an elaborate methodology that shows
new dimensions for developing more robust image segmentation technique is much sought.

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