Semi-automatic segmentation of tongue tumors from magnetic resonance imaging

Radiation therapy is one of the most effective modalities for treatment of tongue cancer. In order to optimize radiation dose to the tumor region, it is necessary to segment the tumor from normal region. This paper presents a new semiautomatic algorithm that is demonstrated to be able to segment tongue tumor from gadolinium-enhanced T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to support radiation planning. This algorithm takes sequential MRI slices with visible tongue tumor. The Tumor´s region from each slice is segmented using three steps (i) preprocessing, (ii) initialization and (iii) localized region-based level set segmentation. The segmentation results obtained from proposed algorithm are compared with manual segmentation from clinical expert. Results from 9 MRI slices show that there is a good overlap between semi-automatic and manual segmentation results with dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 0.87±0.05.