Parametric active contour model-based tumor area segmentation from brain MRI images using minimum initial points

Abstract

Accurate brain tumor segmentation from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images is important for proper medication. Manual segmentation may be erroneous and a computer-aided method is recommended for precise segmentation which is also challenging due to the contrast level of MRI images. This research work proposes to utilize a parametric active contour model (PACM)-based deformable snake model to segment brain tumors from MRI images. Conventional PACM model prerequisites some initial points for its initialization which may have a time-consuming issue. The main contribution of this paper is to modify the PACM algorithm, so that it can predict its initial points around the region of interest (ROI) from the given minimum (at least three) initial points. This proposed method aids PACM to find the initial contour points automatically to start the deformable mechanism. Furthermore, different parameters of the PACM algorithm are optimized for the segmentation by check and trial method. The proposed method is applied to different shapes of brain tumors inside the MRI images and found satisfactory segmentation outcomes. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm reports the number of total pixels inside the segmented area. Therefore, we hope that this proposal will help to find the area of critically shaped brain tumor in an MRI image.