Modified fuzzy c-means clustering for automatic tongue base tumour extraction from MRI data

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a widely used imaging modality to extract tumour regions to assist in radiotherapy and surgery planning. Extraction of a tongue base tumour from MRI is challenging due to variability in its shape, size, intensities and fuzzy boundaries. This paper presents a new automatic algorithm that is shown to be able to extract tongue base tumour from gadolinium-enhanced T1-weighted (T1+Gd) MRI slices. In this algorithm, knowledge of tumour location is added to the objective function of standard fuzzy c-means (FCM) to extract the tumour region. Experimental results on 9 real MRI slices demonstrate that there is good agreement between manual and automatic extraction results with dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 0.77±0.08.