Fully automatic 3D glioma extraction in multi-contrast MRI

Abstract

This work deals with the fully automatic extraction of a glioma, the most common type of brain tumor, in multi-contrast 3D magnetic resonance volumes. The detection is based on the locating the area that breaks the left-right symmetry of the brain. The proposed method uses multi-contrast MRI, where FLAIR and T2-weighted volumes are employed. The algorithm was designed to extract the whole pathology as one region. The created algorithm was tested on 80 volumes from publicly available BRATS databases containing multi-contrast 3D brain volumes afflicted by a brain tumor. These pathological structures had various sizes and shapes and were located in various parts of the brain. The extraction process was evaluated by Dice Coefficient(0.75). The proposed algorithm detected and extracted multifocal tumors as separated regions as well.