Improving the MRI Tumor Segmentation Process Using Appropriate Image Processing Techniques
—Segmenting tumor from MRI images is an essential but time consuming manual duty. Performing an automatic segmentation is a defying task since different forms of tumor tissue exist for diverse patients and in many cases the tumor is similar to the normal tissue. Various studies proposed earlier to handle the issue of precisely segmenting the tumor but they discard the degradations and their effect to the precision of the segmentation. This article provides a more precise segmentation process through the use of appropriate pre-processing algorithms. The authors studied many enhancement and restoration algorithms and selected the NL-means, Laplacian filter and histogram equalization to be used as preprocessing techniques. Experimental results showed that using a suitable preprocessing scheme would produce a better segmentation process. Index Terms — Medical image processing, Tumor segmentation, MRI images, Non-local Means, Histogram equalization, Laplacian filter. I. INTRODUCTION A tumor is a mass of tissue that grows out of control of the normal forces that regulates growth. Brain tumor has a higher mortality rate when compared to more common types of cancer. This underlines the need of accurate prognosis of brain tumor in health care industry [1]. MRI has become a widely-used method of high-quality medical imaging, especially in brain imaging [2]. Image segmentation refers to the process of partitioning a digital image into multiple segments, also known as super pixels. Image segmentation is an important process in computer vision and image processing, which divides an image into a number of disjoint regions such that the pixels have high similarity in order to use its different fields; science, medical, agriculture and industrial fields [3]. Besides, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) images are known to be corrupted by noise [4], blur [5] and low contrast artifact [6]. Therefore, this article discusses the issue of achieving a better segmentation through the use of proper image restoration and enhancement techniques. Moreover, the accurate and automatic segmentation of a brain tumor on MRI image is of great interest for assessing tumor growth and treatment responses, enhancing computer-assisted surgery, and constructing tumor growth models [7]. For those reasons, an automatic and reliable tumor segmentation method would be a useful tool since the medical image segmentation plays an instrumental role in clinical diagnosis [8]. The rest of the article sections are organized as the following: in section two, a brief elucidation about some related studies is presented as the used literature review. Moreover, detailed explanations about the employed algorithms are delivered in section three as a methodology. Also, the results of the proposed methodology are illustrated in section four as the experimental results. Likewise, a detailed discussion about the use of certain algorithms and its results is deliberated in section five. Finally, a brief closure about this article is provided in section six as a conclusion. II. LITERATURE REVIEW In this section, three recent studies are briefly described. The first study was presented by [9] which proposed a texture based analysis to identify irregularity in the brain and automatic segmentation using seeded region growing segmentation. The method of tumor detection based on the texture of the MRI is proposed to segment the abnormality from the regular adjacent, although small quantities misclassified, but the segmentation result is precise. Moreover, [10] suggested a strong technique for automatic detection of tumor for brain MRI images. He also proposed a new morphological technique which is used for the stripped skull region from the brain images. Detecting tumor precisely based on seeded region growing segmentation on an improved single seed point selection algorithm is
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