Segmentation of Ischemic Stroke Lesion in Brain MRI Based on Social Group Optimization and Fuzzy-Tsallis Entropy

Abstract

Stroke is one of the widespread causes of morbidity worldwide and is also the foremost reason for attained disability in human community. Ischemic stroke can be confirmed by investigating the interior brain regions. Magnetic resonance image (MRI) is one of the noninvasive imaging techniques widely adopted in medical discipline to record brain malformations. In this paper, a hybrid semi-automated image processing methodology is proposed to inspect the ischemic stroke lesion using the MRI recorded with flair and diffusion-weighted modality. The proposed approach consists of two sections, namely the preprocessing based on the social group optimization monitored Fuzzy-Tsallis entropy and post-processing technique, which consists of a segmentation algorithm to extract the ISL from preprocessed image in order to estimate the stroke severity and also to plan for further treatment process. The proposed hybrid approach is experimentally investigated using the ischemic stroke lesion segmentation challenge database. This work also presents a detailed investigation among well-known segmentation approaches, like watershed algorithm, region growing technique, principal component analysis, Chan–Vese active contour, and level set approaches, existing in the literature. The results of the experimental work executed using ISLES 2015 challenge dataset confirm that proposed methodology offers superior average values for image similarity indices like Jaccard (78.60%), Dice (88.54%), false positive rate (3.69%), and false negative rate (11.78%). This work also helps to achieve improved value of sensitivity (99.65%), specificity (78.05%), accuracy (91.17%), precision (98.11%), BCR (90.19%), and BER (6.09%).