Comparative Analysis between Active Contour and Otsu Thresholding Segmentation Algorithms in Segmenting Brain Tumor Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Abstract

The accuracy of brain tumor detection and segmentation are greatly affected by tumors’ location, shape, and image properties. In some situations, brain tumor detection and segmentation processes are greatly complicated and far from being completely resolved. The accuracy of the segmentation process significantly influences the diagnosis process, such as abnormal tissue detection, disease classification, and assessment. However, medical images, in particular, the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), often include undesirable artefacts such as noise, density inhomogeneity, and partial volume effects. Although many segmentation methods have been proposed, the accuracy of the segmentation results can be further improved. Subsequently, this study attempts to provide very important properties about the size, initial location and shape of tumors known as Region of Interest (RoI) to kick-start the segmentation process. The MRI consists of a sequence of images (MRI slices) of a particular person and not one image. Our method chooses the best image among them based on the tumor size, initial location and shape to avoid the partial volume effects. The selected algorithms to test our method are Active Contour and Otsu Thresholding algorithms. Several experiments are conducted in this research using the BRATS standard dataset that consist of 100 samples. These experiments comprised of MRI slices of 65 patients. The proposed method is evaluated by the similarity coefficient as a standardmeasure using Dice, Jaccard, and BF scores. The results revealed that the Active Contour algorithm has higher segmentation accuracy when tested across the three different similarity coefficients. Moreover, the achieved results of the two algorithms verify the ability of the proposed method to choose the best RoIs of the MRI samples.