Statistical Asymmetry-based Brain Tumor Segmentation from 3D MR Images

The precise segmentation of brain tumors from MR images is necessary for surgical planning. However, it is a tedious task for the medical professionals to process manually. The performance of supervised machine learning techniques for automatic tumor segmentation is time consuming and very dependent on the type of the training samples. Brain tumors are statistically asymmetrical blobs with respect to the mid-sagittal plane (MSP) in the brain and we present an asymmetry-based, novel, fast, fully-automatic and unsupervised framework for 3D brain tumor segmentation from MR images. Our approach detects asymmetrical intensity deviation of brain tissues in 4 stages: (1) automatic MSP extraction, (2) asymmetrical slice extraction for an estimated tumor location, (3) region of interest localization, and (4) 3D tumor volume delineation using a watershed method. The method has been validated on 17 clinical MR volumes with a 71.23%±27.68% mean Jaccard Coefficient.