Threshold-based 3D Tumor Segmentation using Level Set (TSL)

Three-dimensional segmentation is reliable approach to achieve a proper estimation of tumor volume. Among all possible methods for this purpose, level set can be used as a powerful tool which implicitly extracts the tumor surface. In this paper, we introduce a threshold-based algorithm for 3D tumor segmentation using level set (TSL). This algorithm uses a global threshold to form the level set speed function which is updated iteratively throughout the level set growing process. An important feature of TSL is that no explicit knowledge about the tumor and non-tumor density functions is required. The proposed method can be implemented in the automatic and semi-automatic forms depending on the complexity of the tumor shape. TSL is examined on several clinical MRIs for both visual and quantitative evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach