Fast level set method for glioma brain tumor segmentation based on Superpixel fuzzy clustering and lattice Boltzmann method

Background and Objective: Brain tumor segmentation is a challenging issue due to noise, artifact, and intensity non-uniformity in magnetic resonance images (MRI). Manual MRI segmentation is a very tedious, time-consuming, and user-dependent task. This paper aims to presents a novel level set method to address aforementioned challenges for reliable and automatic brain tumor segmentation. Methods: In the proposed method, a new functional, based on level set method, is presented for medical image segmentation. Firstly, we define a superpixel fuzzy clustering objective function. To create superpixel regions, multiscale morphological gradient reconstruction (MMGR) operation is used. Secondly, a novel fuzzy energy functional is defined based on superpixel segmentation and histogram computation. Then, level set equations are obtained by using gradient descent method. Finally, we solve the level set equations by using lattice Boltzmann method (LBM). To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, both synthetic image dataset and real Glioma brain tumor images from BraTS 2017 dataset are used. Results: Experiments indicate that our proposed method is robust to noise, initialization, and intensity non-uniformity. Moreover, it is faster and more accurate than other state-of-the-art segmentation methods with the averages of running time is 3.25 seconds, Dice and Jaccard coefficients for automatic tumor segmentation against ground truth are 0.93 and 0.87, respectively. The mean value of Hausdorff distance, Mean absolute Distance (MAD), accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity are 2.70, 0.005, 0.9940, 0.9183, and 0.9972, respectively. Conclusions: Our proposed method shows satisfactory results for Glioma brain tumor segmentation due to superpixel fuzzy clustering accurate segmentation results. Moreover, our method is fast and robust to noise, initialization, and intensity non-uniformity. Since most of the medical images suffer from these problems, the proposed method can more effective for complicated medical image segmentation. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.