Detection of brain tumour from MRI image using modified region growing and neural network

Abstract

Region growing is an important application of image segmentation in medical research for detection of tumour. In this paper, we propose an effective modified region growing technique for detection of brain tumour. It consists of four steps which includes: (i) pre-processing; (2) modified region growing by the inclusion of an additional orientation constraint in addition to the normal intensity constrain; (3) feature extraction of the region; and (4) final classification using the neural network. The performance of the proposed technique is systematically evaluated using the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain images received from the public sources. For validating the effectiveness of the modified region growing, we have considered the quantity rate parameter. For the evaluation of the proposed technique of tumour detection, we make use of sensitivity, specificity and accuracy values which we compute from finding out false positive, false negative, true positive and true negative. Comparative analyses were made of the normal and the modified region growing using both the Feed Forward Neural Network (FFNN) and Radial Basis Function (RBF) neural network. From the results obtained, we could see that the proposed technique achieved the accuracy of 80% for the testing dataset, which clearly demonstrated the effectiveness of the modified region growing when compared to the normal technique.

Keywords:

• MRI image
• Gaussian filter
• region growing
• feature extraction
• neural network
• tumour detection