Automated glioma detection and segmentation using graphical models

PLoS One. 2018 Aug 21;13(8):e0200745. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0200745. eCollection 2018.

Abstract

Glioma detection and segmentation is a challenging task for radiologists and clinicians. The research reported in this paper seeks to develop a better clinical decision support algorithm for clinicians diagnosis. This paper presents a probabilistic method for detection and segmentation between abnormal tissue regions and brain tumour (tumour core and edema) portions from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). A framework is constructed to learn structure of undirected graphical models that can represent the spatial relationships among variables and apply it to glioma segmentation. Compared with the pixel of image, the superpixel is more consistent with human visual cognition and contains less redundancy, thus, the superpixels are considered as the basic unit of structure learning and glioma segmentation scheme. ℓ1-regularization techniques are applied to learn the appropriate structure for modeling graphical models. Conditional Random Fields (CRF) are used to model the spatial interactions among image superpixel regions and their measurements. A number of features including statistics features, the combined features from the local binary pattern as well as gray level run length, curve features, and fractal features were extracted from each superpixel. The features are then passed by ℓ1-regularization to ensure a robust classification. The proposed method is compared with support vector machine and Fuzzy c-means to classify each superpixel into normal and abnormal tissue. The proposed system is tested for the presence of low grade as well as high grade glioma tumors on images collected from BRATS2013, BRATS2015 data set and Henan Provincial People's Hospital (HNPPH) data set. The experiments performed provides similarity between segmented and truth image up to 91.5% by correlation method.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Brain Neoplasms / diagnosis*
  • Glioma / diagnosis*
  • Humans
  • Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging / methods*
  • Neoplasm Grading
  • ROC Curve
  • Reproducibility of Results

Grants and funding

This research has been funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (http://www.nsfc.gov.cn/) under the grant number U1404606, 61772576, 81772009, and 81720108021, the Science & Technology Development Project of Henan Province in China (http://www.hnkjt.gov.cn/) under the grant number 172102210587. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.