2015 3rd International Conference on Computer, Information and Application

Brain Tumor Segmentation in Multi-Modality MRIs Using Multiple Classifier System

and Spatial Constraint

Tianming Zhan, Yongzhao Zhan

School of Computer Science & communications Engineering
Jiangsu University
Zhenjiang, P. R. China
ztm@ujs.edu.cn

Yao Ji, Shenghua Gu, Jin Wang

Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Big Data Analysis Technology
Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology
Nanjing, P. R. China

Lei Jiang
Petrochina Southwest Oil &Gasfield Company
Luzhou, P. R. China

Abstract—Delineating brain tumor boundaries from multi-modality magnetic resonance images (MRIs) is a crucial step in brain
cancer surgical and treatment planning. In this paper, we propose a fully automatic technique for brain tumor segmentation from
multi-modality human brain MRIs. We first use the intensities of different modalities in MRIs to represent the features of both
normal and abnormal tissues. Then, the multiple classifier system (MCS) is applied to calculate the probabilities of brain tumor
and normal brain tissue in the whole image. At last, the spatial-contextual information is proposed by constraining the classified
neighbors to improve the classification accuracy. Our method was evaluated on 20 multi-modality patient datasets with competitive
segmentation results.

Keywords- Brain tumor segmentation; Multiple classifier system; Spatial-contextual constraint

I. INTRODUCTION
A brain tumor is a mass or growth of abnormal cells in human brain or close to human brain. The human brain tumor can
be classified to many different types such as noncancerous (benign), and cancerous (malignant). Brain tumor treatment
options depend on the type of brain tumor the patient have, as well as its size and location. However, it is a particularly time
consuming task for radiologists to segment the brain tumor for location and statistical analysis. Also, in most cases the task is
performed on a 3D data set by labeling the tumor slice by slice on 2D data, limiting the global perspective and potentially
generating sub-optimal segmentations [1-4]. Therefore there is a need for fully automatic segmentation tools for brain tumor
segmentation.
In this paper, we propose a fully automatic technique by integrating the multiple classifier system (MCS) and spatial
constraint for brain tumor segmentation from multi-modality human brain MRIs. We first use the intensities of different
modalities in MRIs to represent the features of both normal and abnormal tissues. Then, MCS is applied to calculate the
probabilities of brain tumor and normal brain tissue in the whole image. At last, the spatial regularization introduces spatial
constraints to the MCS to take into account the pair-wise homogeneity in terms of classification labels and multi-modality
voxel intensities. Our method was evaluated on 20 multi-modality patient datasets with competitive segmentation results.
II. METHODS
Let X {x1 , x2 ,, xn } be the input multi-modality MRIs, where xi [ xiT 1 , xiT 2 , xiPD , xiFL ]T denotes a vector built by using
the intensities from multi-modality MRIs and associated with an image pixel i  S , S {1, 2, , n} is the set of integers
indexing the pixels n of x . Y ( y1 ,..., yn )  Ln is the image of labels, L {1,..., K } is the set of class
labels, D {( x1 , y1 ),..., ( xM , yM )} is the training set, M is the total number of training samples. The goal of classification is to

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DOI 10.1109/CIA.2015.12
assign a label yi  L to each pixel vector xi .
According to [5], MCS combines class labels or probabilities from multiple classifiers. The final output mainly depends
on the supervised classifier and the diversity among the classification results. In this paper, Naïve Bayes (NB) classifier [6]
and multinomial logistic regression (MLR) classifier [7] are chosen due to both of these two classifiers are able to generate
the class labels and probabilities by training the samples selected by the radiologists.
A. Bayesian weighted average
After the probabilities of each pixel in MRIs are obtained by NB classifier and MLR classifier, Bayesian weighted
average which follows a linear opinion pool is used to produce the final probabilities as follows:
p ( yi k | xi )=O p NB ( yi k | xi )  (1  O ) p MLR ( yi k | xi ; Z ) (1)
where O is a tunable parameter which controls the weights between the probability obtained by NB classifier and the
probability obtained by MLR classifier. The range of parameter O is O  [0,1] . If O 1 , the classification results is same as
that obtained by NB classifier, and is equal to the results obtained by MLR classifier when O 0. In our experiments, we
select O 0.5 , which means that the effects of NB classifier and MLR classifier to the final probability are the same.
B. Global energy cost function imposing the spatial constraint
The segmentation results are not accurate enough when only using the probabilities calculated in above section, because
this technique only consider the image pixels as the discrete signals and without consider the spatial correlation in the whole
image. In order to encourage the spatial information to improve the segmentation accuracy, we integrate the probability
information and the spatial information together to propose the following optimization problem of an energy cost function:
­° n § · ½°
y arg min ®¦ ¨  ln( p ( yi | xi ))  P ¦ yi  y j ¸¾ (2)
¯° i 1 © jNi ¹ ¿°
where the first term in (2) is the data term imposing the probability information which is obtained by MCS, and the second
term is the total variation term which encourages the pixels in neighborhood to belong to the same class in spatial domain.
Parameter P controls the importance of spatial information. In this paper, the method proposed in [8] is applied to solve our
optimization problem in (2).
III. APPLICATIONS
We evaluate our model on the BRATS challenge data set (http://www.imm.dtu.dk/projects /BRATS2012) of 20 MRIs
with brain tumor, 10 subjects are simulated data and other 10 subjects are real patient data. Each subject comprises T1, T2,
FLAIR and post-Gadolinium T1 modalities. All volumes are linearly co-registered to the T1 contrast image, skull stripped,
and bias correction using N3 method.
The result of our algorithm for a real patient data is shown in Fig. 1. The first row shows four T1C images from
different slices of one 3D data. The segmentation results of our algorithm are demonstrated in the second row. The last row
shows the corresponding segmentation of brain tumor provided by expert radiologist and used only for performance
evaluation and comparison. It is clear that our brain tumor segmentation results show a high similarity to the ground truth
(the third row) demonstrating the efficacy of our solution.

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Figure 1 An example of 3D brain tumor segmentation. First row: the T1C images of different slices from a real patient subject. Second row: Segmentation
results produced by our algorithm. Third row: manual segmentation obtained by a radiologist.

IV. CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION

In this paper, we presented a novel brain tumor segmentation method by using multiple classifier system and spatial
constraint. Firstly, the Naïve Bayes classifier and multinomial logistic regression classifier are trained by using the training
samples from the radiologists. Then, these two classifiers are applied to calculate the probability of each test pixel. After that,
Bayesian weighted average from MCS is generated using linear combination of probabilities of above two different
classifiers. At last, the global energy optimization function which can be solved by graph cut method is proposed by
integrating the spatial-contextual information into the intensity information represented by the probability. Our method was
evaluated on 20 BRATS challenge subjects; the higher segmentation results demonstrate the advantage and considerable
competence of our method.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work is supported by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation Funded Project (No.2014M561587), Jiangsu
Postdoctoral Science Foundation Funded Project (No.1402094C), Research Foundation for Talented Scholars, Jiangsu
University (No.14JDG041). The Graduate Student Research Innovation Project of Jiangsu Province.

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