BRAIN TUMOR CONCAVITY ANALYSIS by K.Muthu Kumar, PSN College

International Journal of Computer Application Issue 3, Volume 1 (February 2013)
Available online on http://www.rspublication.com/ijca/ijca_index.htm ISSN: 2250-1797

Page 1

BRAIN TUMOR IN THREE DIMENSIONAL
MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGES AND
CONCAVITY ANALYSIS
B. Vijayakumar, Ashish Chaturvedi and K. Muthu Kumar
Research Scholar, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, CMJ University,
Shillong,Meghalya, India
Professor,Arni School of Computer Science and Application, Arni University, Indora (Kathgarh),
Himachal Pradesh, India
PG Scholor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering,PSN College of
Engineering, Tirunelveli,Tamil Nadu,India
__________________________________________________________________________
Abstract Medical Imaging is perceived to designate the images of the visceral lineament
of the fleshy personality Manual segmentation of brain tumors by medical perpetrators has
imbecility to the variance and intricacy of tumors. Benign or malignant sorting through
truculent propriety and apart from brain tumors are 120 different types based on World
Health Organization (WHO) classification system. Tumors dont manifest any
circumscription and persuades grotesque mutilations of the proximate anatomy of the brain.
Automatic contour models maneuver a requisite role in meticulously delineating the tumor in
permeate of which Fluid Vector Flow exemplifies predicament of meager confiscating gamut
and spectacular convergence for intaglios confronted by the auxiliary model. FVF is utilized
for segmentation of two dimensional brain tumor MR images to extract the tumor and
projected into the three dimensional plane to analyze the depth of the tumor. Finally, a feature
extraction by first order and second order GLCM (Gray level Co-occurrence Matrix) of
segmented brain MR images. Then, support vector machine classifier is utilized to perform
two functions. The first is to differentiate and classify the type of abnormality in benign or
malignant tumor.
Keywords Active contour models, brain tumor, vector flow, projection.
________________________________________________________________________

I. Introduction

In our human life, the disease affecting the body of an organism and construe to medical
condition specifying some symptoms and signs. Nowadays, brain tumor is more prevalent
and it is an abnormal growth of cells that grow in the brain itself.It is inherently lethal and
spread in the limited space of the intracranial cavity.In our brain, tumor prominently occur
either in glial or non-glial cells.The supporting cells of the brain found in the white matter
is glial cells(gliomas) which are astrocytes,oligodendrocytes, ependymal cells and
infection fighting cells of CNS named microglia and tumors evolve from this region
inculdes astrocytomas,ependymomas,oligodendrogliomas,glioblastomas multiforme and
brain stem gliomas.The non-gliomas occur in other brain structures like meninges and
nerve sheathit is covering tissue of the brain and tumors spread in meninges are called
meningiomas while tumors start from nerve sheath are neurilemmomas,acoustic neuromas
and vestibular schwannomas. The tumor has fixed shape in its region like
oligodendrogliomas are fried egg shaped cells and astrocytomas are star shaped
cells[8].To obtain high accuracy of detecting the tumors in the various medical images, the
automated classification is established.The repeated analysis of medical image yields
improving in tumor detection.The segmentation of tumor image are performed by active
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contour models and it rudimentaly classified on two types based on its speed and
range.First, Parametric set counter model that fastly segment single object which are
Gradient Vector Flow (GVF), Boundary Vector Flow (BVF) and Fluid vector Flow (FVF)
while the next type Level set active contour models slowly capture multiple objects which
include Magnetostatic Active Contour model (MAC).FVF achieves better concavities
convergence, large capture range,reduced noise level, faster and prevent multiple false
objects than other contour models for segmenting the tumor image[1]. Next phase,
Feature extraction of image based on the transformation consists of many techniques like
texture features, Gabor features, wavelet transform at the features, PCA and boundary
feature extraction. We are proposing a texture feature named as GLCM (Gray level Co-
occurrence Matrix) extracts the tumor image based on gray level of the image to find out
the histogram features and then Co-Occurrence Matrix Based Features for spatial
information[9]. Finally, we classified the images based on SVM which is an effective
supervised classifier and accurate learning. Technique it is derived from the statistical
theory invented by Vapnik et al. (1982) [10]. The rest of this paper is organized as follows.
In Section II, related work is described. Section III introduces segmentation and
projection of tumor. Discussions are presented in Section IV, the study of conclusion in
Section V.

The main contributions of our proposed technique are:
Pre-processing the input MR images using weinner filter
Tumor regions are segmented by using one the latest active contour models named as
Fluid Vector Flow
Feature extraction for the region is done by the GLCM (Gray level Co-occurrence
Matrix)
Finally, Selected features are input to Support Vector Machine (SVM) for training
Then classify the tumor and non-tumor images through evaluating matrix parameters
of sensitivity, specificity and accuracy to compare the performance.

II. RELATED WORK
Soft Computing techniques such as fuzzy logic and neural networks have been used for
segmentation of brain tumor. Segmentation of brain tumor using HSOM (Hierarchical Self
Organizing Map), an unsupervised clustering technique maps high dimensional inputs to one
or two dimensional discrete lattice of neuron units [2]. HSOM method aids physicians in
tumor diagnosis and monitoring. Another segmentation technique which is an extension to
traditional Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) clustering algorithm which considers two influential
factors: feature difference between neighboring pixels and the relative locations of
neighboring pixels in the image [4].
FCM, by considering those factors greatly restrained the influence of noise. Fuzzy
algorithms for Learning Vector Quantization (FALVQ), an unsupervised learning process
discriminated normal tissues and abnormalities of the brain by partitioning the set of feature
vectors obtained from an MR image into a relatively small number of clusters [6]. Yan Zhu
and Hong Yan proposed an optimization framework for detection of tumor boundaries
using a Hopfield neural network [8]. The tumor boundary was detected in consecutive
slices in such a way to extend making use of the aspect of connectivity to speed up the
process. Since a tumor doesnt have accurate shapes, detection of tumor boundary is a
difficult task. Active Contour Models play a vital role in accurately capturing the boundary of
the tumor. One such is the traditional snakes or active contours. They are nothing but curves
defined within an image domain that can move under the influence of internal forces coming
from within the curve itself and external forces computed from the image data [5], [7]. There
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are two key difficulties with snakes. First, the initial contour must, in general, be close to
the true boundary or else it will likely converge to the wrong result.
The second problem is that active contours have difficulties progressing into boundary
concavities. Then a new class of external forces for active contour models that addresses
both problems called Gradient Vector Flow (GVF) [9] emerged. It diffuses the edge
information from the object contour to its neighborhood. Particular advantages of the GVF
snake over a traditional snake are its insensitivity to initialization and its ability to move into
boundary concavities. Its initializations can be inside, outside, or across the objects
boundary and it does not need prior knowledge about whether to shrink or expand toward
the boundary. Then a new external force which is generated by a novel interpolation scheme
which reduced the computational requirement significantly called Boundary Vector Flow
(BVF) [10] came into existence. It has improved the capture range and concave object
extraction capability than Gradient Vector Flow. BVF provided large downward force thus
reducing the evolution steps required to converge to the object. Magnetostatic Active
Contour model (MAC) utilized bidirectional force field with the ability of dynamically
updating itself while the contour evolves [3]. MAC being a level set active contour model
may capture multiple false objects in the presence of noise. S. Lobregt described a new
technique called discrete dynamic contour model [7] for defining contours in 2D images.It
consists of a set of connected vertices as the initial model and undergoes deformations to
extract the boundary of the object. It incorporated elegant solutions to shrinking and
clustering problems. Tao Wang developed a new concept called Fluid Vector Flow (FVF)
[1] for addressing the problems of limited capture range and poor convergence for
concavities. FVF is insensitive to initialize by taking advantage of the boundary map
generated from the image. The capture range of FVF extends to the whole image because
the vector flow energy spreads around the entire image.

Figure-1 Proposed system flow diagram

III. Proposed Method
The Objective is to segment the brain tumor using Fluid Vector Flow (FVF) and
then extract the image through GLCM and classifying the image through SVM and finally,
implementing the three dimensional visualization of tumor through 3D software. The
contour evolves to capture the target object i.e. the brain tumor. The methods used are
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preprocessing, binary boundary map generat ion, vector flow init ializat ion, FVF and
Depth Analysis. Fig.1 shows the flow diagram of the proposed method which starts with
smoothing the input image using a weinner smoothing filter and edge finding using a
gradient operator. Then the binary boundary map is generated, and vector flow is initiated,
and FVF is computed iteratively until the object i.e. the tumor is extracted. Then the
extracted tumor is projected onto the three dimensional plane for analyzing the depth or
volume of the tumor

A. Preprocessing
Weinner filter: The inverse filtering is a restoration technique for deconvolution, i.e., when
the image is blurred by a known low pass filter, it is possible to recover the image by inverse
filtering or generalized inverse filtering. However, inverse filtering is very sensitive to
additive noise. The approach of reducing one degradation at a time allows us to develop a
restoration algorithm for each type of degradation and simply combine them. The Wiener
filtering executes an optimal tradeoff between inverse filtering and noise smoothing. It
removes the additive noise and inverts the blurring simultaneously. The Wiener filtering is
optimal in terms of the mean square error. In other words, it minimizes the overall mean
square error in the process of inverse filtering and noise smoothing. The Wiener filtering is a
linear estimation of the original image. The approach is based on a stochastic framework. The
orthogonality principle implies that the Wiener filter in Fourier domain can be expressed as
follows:
.(1, 2) =
1,2 (1,2)
[(1,2)|2 1,2+(1,2)

Where (1, 2) , (1, 2)are respectively power spectra of the original image and the
additive noise, and is the blurring filter. It is easy to see that the Wiener filter has two
separate part, an inverse filtering part and a noise smoothing part. It not only performs the
deconvolution by inverse filtering (highpass filtering) but also removes the noise with a
compression operation (lowpass filtering).
To implement the Wiener filter in practice we have to estimate the power spectra of the
original image and the additive noise. For white additive noise the power spectrum is equal to
the variance of the noise. To estimate the power spectrum of the original image many
methods can be used. A direct estimate is the paradigm estimate of the power spectrum
computed from the observed:
S
per
yy
=1/N[Y(k,l)Y(k,l)
*
]
Where Y(k,l) is the DFT of the observation. The advantage of the estimate is that it can be
implemented very easily without worrying about the singularity of the inverse filtering.
B. Binary Boundary Map Generation
The boundary map is defined as
( , ) ( ( , )* ( , )) MB x y G x y I x y
o
= V
Where G
(x, y) is the Gaussian smoothing filter with standard deviation , * is the

convolution operator, and is the gradient operator. The normalized boundary map is
defined as
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( , ) min( ( , ))
( , )
max( ( , ) min( ( , ))
B B
NB
B B
M x y M x y
M x y
M x y M x y

( , ) 1 ( , )
0
BB NM
M x y if M x y T
else
= >

The choice of suitable threshold value varies depending on the intensity distribution and
contrast associated with the set of i mages being anal yzed. For t he br ain MR
i mages a threshold of 0.1 is used to achieve object continuity and for extracting the low
intensity region.
C. Vector Flow Initialization

The contour must be initialized to initialize the external force field. The initial contour can
be inside, outside or overlapping the target objects. FVF is insensitive to initialize by taking
advantage of the binary boundary map. Contour C can be represented as
( ) ( ) 0,1,..... 1
i i
c i x y i P ={ , } e| |
Where P is the number of points on the contour. An external energy function is defined as
( , ) ( cos , sin )
e x y
E x y f f _ o u o u = + + ---------------------------------------- (8)
When M
BB
(x, y) = 0 , E
e
(x,y) holds the first value in (8), otherwise holds zero.
Where is a normalization operator, = 1 (controls the inward or outward direction when
the contour is outside or inside),
( ) ( ( , ))
x y
f f I x y _
,
= V and [ , 2 ] o u t e

D. FVF Computation and Contour Extraction
A trace method is applied to the binary boundary map to get a list of control points. The
control points are used to generate the external force fields. FVF has directional and gradient
forces. The directional force attracts the evolving contour toward the control points even for
control points in a concave region. When the contour is close to the object, the gradient force
fits the contour onto the object. One control point is sequentially selected and this point flows
freely along the o b j e c t b o u n d a r y a n d g e n e r a t e s a n e xt e r n a l f o r c e f i e l d
dynamically. A parameter is used to manage the selection of control point. The method
selects 1 out of control points to achieve better time efficiency. Once the control point
moves to its new location it generates a new external force field for further evolution of
contour until convergence is achieved. FVF computation is iteratively performed to extract the
tumor.

E. GLCM Extraction based on Histogram and Co-occurrence Maxtrix features:

First-Order Histogram Based Features:
A histogram of the image gives a summary of the statistical information about the
image. So first order statistical information of the image can be obtained using histogram of
the image. The probability density of occurrence of the intensity levels can be obtained by
dividing the value of intensity level histogram with total number of pixels in the image.
P (i) = h (i)/NM, , i=0,1,..G-1
Where N is the number of the resolution cells in the horizontal spatial domain and M
is the number of resolution cells in the vertical spatial domain. G is the total gray level of an
image.
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Co-occurrence Matrix Based Features:
Histogram based features are local in nature. These features do not consider spatial
information into consideration. So for this purpose gray-level spatial co-occurrence matrix
hd (i, j) based features are defined which are known as second order histogram based
features. These features are based on the joint probability distribution of pairs of pixels.
Distance d and angle within a given neighborhood are used for calculation of joint
probability distribution between pixels.

Maximum Probability

Maxprobability = Max p(i, j)
It is simply the largest entry in the matrix and corresponds to the strongest response.

F. Volumetric Projection and Depth Analysis
Volumetric projection of brain tumor is needed for diagnostic application such as
analyzing the depth of the tumor. The extracted tumor enclosed by the contour can be
projected on to the three dimensional plane (i.e. x, y, z plane). The mesh is used for three
dimensional visualization or projection of t u mo r . Three Di me n s i o n a l mo d e l i ng
a l s o k n o wn a s meshing is the process of developing a mathematical representation of
some three dimensional surfaces or object. To perform meshing, a grid must be set up in X
and Y directions and then create a two dimensional grid of coordinate[x, y] with mesh-
grid. It generates x and y arrays for three dimensional projection. As a result of this
projection the tumor is visualized in three dimensions i.e. length, breadth and depth.
Depending upon the gray variety of the projected tumor the depth of the tumor is
analyzed. This projection method requires considerable interactive guidance for satisfactory
results since it is sensitive to image noise and pseudo edges which are common problems in
medical images. Compared to traditional methods in the model based segmentation i.e. Fluid
vector flow aids in accurate projection and analysis of depth of tumor.

G. SVM Classification on 3D tumor image:

Figure-2 Converted image of brain tumor in 3D view
Support Vector Machine classifier to classify the image into tumorous or not. In 1995,
Support Vector Machine (SVM) has been developed, which is an effective supervised
classifier and accurate learning. Technique it is derived from the statistical theory invented by
Vapnik et al. (1982). It produces successful classification results in several application
domains, for e.g., medical diagnosis (Zhang et al., 2006). SVM follows the structural risk
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minimization principle from the statistical learning theory. Its kernel is to control the
practical risk and classification capacity in order to broaden the origin between the classes
and reduce the true costs hang et al., 2004). A support vector machine searches an optimal
separating hyper-plane between members and non-members of a given class in a high. SVM
has also been applied to different real world problems such as face recognition, text
categorization, cancer diagnosis, glaucoma diagnosis, microarray gene expression data
analysis. Proposed system used SVM for binary classification of brain MR image as normal
or a tumor affected. SVM basically tries to divide the given data into decision surface.
Decision surface is a hyperplane which divides the data into two classes. Training points are
the supporting vector which defines the hyperplane. The kernel function H (x, x1) is defined
by the Polynomial kernels is:

H(x, x1) = (xpxq +1)d

where d is an integer.

RBF kernel is:
2 H(x, xq ) = exp( x xq )

Where is positive parameter is slope control.

IV. EXPERIMENT RESULT
Figure-2 shows the results of all experimentations. We first perform classification of the
dataset.Once the classification is done, the malignant brain images are further segmented for
extraction of the tumor region from these brain MR images. The performance of each
classifier is measured in terms of sensitivity, Specificity and Accuracy [16]. Sensitivity is a
measure which determines the probability of the results that are true positive such that a
person has the tumor. Specificity is a measure which determines the probability of the results
that are true negative such that a person does not have the tumor. Accuracy is a measure
which
Determines the probability that how many results are accurately classified.

Sensitivity = TP/(TP + FN)
Specificity = TN/(TN + FP)
Accuracy =
(TN+ TP)
(+++)

Where, TP stands for True Positive, TN stands for True Negative, FN stands for False
Negative and FP stands for False
Positive.Figure.4 shows the competitive charts of different methods.

DISCUSSION
This paper presented an active contour model based approach for automatic
segmentation of tumor in brain MRI images and three dimensional visualization to
analyze the depth of the tumor. Since MRI is the best modality for imaging the brain
which is composed of soft tissues, this method utilizes two dimensional brain MR images.
Compared to traditional segmentation methods active contour models aids in efficient
segmentation of tumor. There are several active contour models such as Gradient vector flow,
Boundary vector flow and Magnetostatic active contour models. All these models have
difficulties regarding capture range and convergence. Since Fluid Vector Flow model has the
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ability of capturing the entire object i.e. the tumor and acute convergence into boundary
concavities. Since segmentation aids in diagnosing the area of the tumor, volumetric
projection is performed to visualize the depth of the tumor. Since manual segmentation of
tumors by physicians is a time consuming
task, this segmentation method with projection is time preserving and also provides accurate
diagnosis.

V. CONCLUSIONS
A parametric Fluid Vector Flow (FVF) active contour model is utilized for automatic
segmentation of tumor in brain MR images and the segmented tumor is visualized in three
dimensions for depth analysis. Since a tumor doesnt exhibit any prior shape, delineating the
tumor accurately is a difficult task. FVF is utilized for segmentation because it can deform
in all directions for capturing the tumor. It also addresses the issues of limited capture range
and the inability to extract complex contours with acute concavities.Segmentation aids in
visualization of area of tumor.Volumetric projection is proposed to analyze the third
dimension i.e. the volume or depth o f the tumor. This automatic method for brain tumor
segmentation and three dimensional visualization will help physicians in accurate diagnosis.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Thanks to Dr.P.Suyambu Sir, Chairman, PSN Group of Institutions, for his valuable suggestion and
constant support and motivation through financially for paper publications
REFERENCES

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[8]University of Washington Medical Center 05/2000. Rev.10/2006 and web data available at :
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AUTHORS
Ashish Chaturvedi is a Professor and Associate director of Arni School of Computer
Science & Application in Arni University

Vijayakumar was born in the Virudhu Nagar District, India in 1977.He completed his
Bachelor of Engineering in Sivanthi Aditanar College of Engineering in 2000 and he
completed his Master of Engineering in MS university in 2004. His research

Muthu Kumar was born in Tirunelveli, India in 1989. He completed his Bachelor of
Information and Technology. His research interests primarily focus on image processing,
especially in the methods related to brain tumor segmentation

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International Journal of Computer Application Issue 3, Volume 1 (February 2013)

Available online on http://www.rspublication.com/ijca/ijca_index.htm ISSN: 2250-1797

(x, y) is the Gaussian smoothing filter with standard deviation , * is the

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