Brain Tumor Segmentation and Extraction of MR Images Based on Improved Watershed Transform

Brain tumor extraction in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has becoming an emergent research area in the field of medical imaging system. Extraction involves detection, localization, tracking, enhancement and recognition of the tumor from the MR brain images. Brain tumor extraction helps in finding the exact size and location of tumor. The watershed transform is a popular and has interesting properties that make it useful for many image segmentation applications. The intuitive description of this transform is quite simple, can be parallelized and always produces a complete division of the medical images. One of the important drawbacks associated to the watershed transform is the over segmentation that commonly results in brain images. We present an improvement to the watershed transform in this paper for the extraction of brain tumor based on segmentation and morphological operator. The tumor may be benign, pre-malignant or malignant and it needs medical support for further classification.