A region-based segmentation of tumour from brain CT images using nonlinear support vector machine classifier

Abstract

The proposed system provides new textural information for segmenting tumours, efficiently and accurately and with less computational time, from benign and malignant tumour images, especially in smaller dimensions of tumour regions of computed tomography (CT) images. Region-based segmentation of tumour from brain CT image data is an important but time-consuming task performed manually by medical experts. The objective of this work is to segment brain tumour from CT images using combined grey and texture features with new edge features and nonlinear support vector machine (SVM) classifier. The selected optimal features are used to model and train the nonlinear SVM classifier to segment the tumour from computed tomography images and the segmentation accuracies are evaluated for each slice of the tumour image. The method is applied on real data of 80 benign, malignant tumour images. The results are compared with the radiologist labelled ground truth. Quantitative analysis between ground truth and the segmented tumour is presented in terms of segmentation accuracy and the overlap similarity measure dice metric. From the analysis and performance measures such as segmentation accuracy and dice metric, it is inferred that better segmentation accuracy and higher dice metric are achieved with the normalized cut segmentation method than with the fuzzy c-means clustering method.

Keywords::

• Support vector machine classifier
• Computed tomography
• Normalized cut

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Dr S. Alagappan, Chief Consultant and Radiologist, Devaki Scan Centre, Madurai for providing CT images and validation.

Declaration of interest: There are no financial or personal relationships with other organizations based on our work. The work is the responsibility of the authors only. This is a research paper related to the PhD thesis of A. P. There are no sources of funding for research.