Statistical Structure Analysis in MRI Brain Tumor Segmentation

Automated MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) brain tumor segmentation is a difficult task due to the variance and complexity of tumors. In this paper, a statistical structure analysis based tumor segmentation scheme is presented, which focuses on the structural analysis on both tumorous and normal tissues. Firstly, 3 kinds of features including intensity-based, symmetry-based and texture-based are extracted from structural elements. Then a classification technique using AdaBoost that learns by selecting the most discriminative features is proposed to classify the structural elements into normal tissues and abnormal tissues. Experimental results on 140 tumor-contained brain MR images achieve an average accuracy of 96.82% on tumor segmentation.