AUTOMATIC BRAIN TUMOR SEGMENTATION USING TISSUE DIFFISIVITY CHARACTERISTICS

Water diffusion measurements have been shown to be sensitive to tissue cellular size, extra cellular volume, and membrane permeability. Therefore, diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) by MRI can be used to characterize highly cellular regions of tumors versus acellular regions, distinguishing cystic regions from solid regions. An automatic segmentation method is proposed in this paper based on a multi-phase clustering algorithm to segment the brain tumors in a feature space extracted from DTI images. The algorithm is applied on images of a total of 20 patients with 4 different types of tumors. The tumor region segmentation was 92% accurate based on the segmentation results using anatomical images and 100% accurate based on biopsy results. In general, the segmentation results obtained by the proposed method revealed a strong agreement with the biopsy results and anatomical images, providing support for the accuracy and robustness of the proposed feature space and the segmentation procedure.