HYBRID APPROACH FOR BRAIN TUMOR SEGMENTATION IN MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGES USING CELLULAR NEURAL NETWORKS AND OPTIMIZATION TECHNIQUES

Abstract

Tumor segmentation from brain magnetic resonance image data is an important but time consuming task performed manually by medical experts. Automating this process is challenging due to the high diversity in appearance of tumor tissue among different patients and in many cases, similarity between tumor and normal tissue. This paper deals with an efficient segmentation algorithm for extracting brain tumors in magnetic resonance images using Cellular Neural Networks (CNN). Learning CNN templates values are formulated as an optimization problem. The template coefficients (weights) of an CNN which will give a desired performance, can be derived by learning genetic algorithm and simulated annealing optimization techniques. The objective of this work is to compare the performance of genetic algorithm (GA) and simulated annealing (SA) for finding the optimum template values in the CNN which is used for segmenting the tumor region in the abnormal MR images. The method is applied on real data of MRI images of thirty patients with four different types of tumors. The results are compared with radiologist labeled ground truth. Quantitative analysis between ground truth and segmented tumor is presented in terms of segmentation efficiency. From the analysis and performance measures like segmentation accuracy, it is inferred that the brain tumor segmentation is best done using CNN with genetic algorithm template optimization than CNN with simulated annealing template optimization. An average accuracy rate of above 95% was obtained using this segmentation algorithm.