An adaptive window-setting scheme for segmentation of bladder tumor surface via MR cystography

This paper proposes an adaptive window-setting scheme for noninvasive detection and segmentation of bladder tumor surface in T(1)-weighted magnetic resonance (MR) images. The inner border of the bladder wall is first covered by a group of ball-shaped detecting windows with different radii. By extracting the candidate tumor windows and excluding the false positive (FP) candidates, the entire bladder tumor surface is detected and segmented by the remaining windows. Different from previous bladder tumor detection methods that are mostly focusing on the existence of a tumor, this paper emphasizes segmenting the entire tumor surface in addition to detecting the presence of the tumor. The presented scheme was validated by ten clinical T(1)-weighted MR image datasets (five volunteers and five patients). The bladder tumor surfaces and the normal bladder wall inner borders in the ten datasets were covered by 223 and 10,491 windows, respectively. Such a large number of the detecting windows makes the validation statistically meaningful. In the FP reduction step, the best feature combination was obtained by using receiver operating characteristics or ROC analysis. The validation results demonstrated the potential of this presented scheme in segmenting the entire tumor surface with high sensitivity and low FP rate. This study inherits our previous results of automatic segmentation of the bladder wall and will be an important element in our MR-based virtual cystoscopy or MR cystography system.