Advance computer analysis of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for early brain tumor detection

The brain tumor grows inside the skull and interposes with regular brain functioning. The tumor growth may possibly result in cancer at a later stage. The early detection of brain tumor is crucial for successful treatment of fatal disease. The tumor presence is normally detected by Computed Tomography (CT) or Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) images. The MRI/CT images are highly complex and involve huge data. This requires highly tedious and time-consuming process for detection of small tumors for the neurologists. Thus, there is a need to develop an effective and less time-consuming imaging technique for early detection of brain tumors.

This paper mainly focuses on early detecting and localizing the brain tumor region using segmentation of patient's MRI images. The Matlab software experiments are performed on a set of fifteen tumorous MRI images. In the proposed work, four image segmentation modalities namely watershed transform, k-means clustering, thresholding and Fuzzy C Means Clustering techniques with median filtering have been implemented.

The results are verified by quantitative comparison of results in terms of image quality evaluation parameters-Entropy, standard deviation and Naturalness Image Quality Evaluator. A remarkable rise in the entropy and standard deviation values has been noticed.

The watershed transform segmentation with median filtering yields the best quality brain tumor images. The noteworthy improvement in visibility of the MRI images may highly increase the possibilities of early detection and successful treatment of brain tumor disease and thereby assists the clinicians to decide the precise therapies.