Evaluation of Three Methods for MRI Brain Tumor Segmentation

Imaging plays a central role in the diagnosis and treatment planning of brain tumor. An accurate segmentation is critical, especially when the tumor morphological changes remain subtle, irregular and difficult to assess by clinical examination. Traditionally, segmentation is performed manually in clinical environment that is operator dependent and very tedious and time consuming labor intensive work. However, automated tumor segmentation in MRI brain tumor poses many challenges with regard to characteristics of an image. A comparison of three different semi-automated methods, viz., modified gradient magnitude region growing technique (MGRRGT), level set and a marker controlled watershed method is undertaken here for evaluating their relative performance in the segmentation of tumor. A study on 9 samples using MGRRGT reveals that all the errors are within 6 to 23% in comparison to other two methods.