Multifractal Texture Estimation for Detection and Segmentation of Brain Tumors

A stochastic model for characterizing tumor texture in brain magnetic resonance (MR) images is proposed. The efficacy of the model is demonstrated in patient-independent brain tumor texture feature extraction and tumor segmentation in magnetic resonance images (MRIs). Due to complex appearance in MRI, brain tumor texture is formulated using a multiresolution-fractal model known as multifractional Brownian motion (mBm). Detailed mathematical derivation for mBm model and corresponding novel algorithm to extract spatially varying multifractal features are proposed. A multifractal feature-based brain tumor segmentation method is developed next. To evaluate efficacy, tumor segmentation performance using proposed multifractal feature is compared with that using Gabor-like multiscale texton feature. Furthermore, novel patient-independent tumor segmentation scheme is proposed by extending the well-known AdaBoost algorithm. The modification of AdaBoost algorithm involves assigning weights to component classifiers based on their ability to classify difficult samples and confidence in such classification. Experimental results for 14 patients with over 300 MRIs show the efficacy of the proposed technique in automatic segmentation of tumors in brain MRIs. Finally, comparison with other state-of-the art brain tumor segmentation works with publicly available low-grade glioma BRATS2012 dataset show that our segmentation results are more consistent and on the average outperforms these methods for the patients where ground truth is made available.