Validation techniques for quantitative brain tumors measurements

Quantitative measurements of tumor volume becomes more realistic with the use of imaging-particularly specially when the tumor have non-ellipsoidal morphology, which remains subtle, irregular and difficult to assess by visual metric and clinical examination. The quantitative measurements depend strongly on the accuracy of the segmentation technique. The validity of brain tumor segmentation methods is an important issue in medical imaging because it has a direct impact on many applications such as surgical planning and quantitative measurements of tumor volume. Our goal was to examine two popular segmentation techniques seeded region growing and active contour "snakes" to be compared against experts' manual segmentations as the gold standard. We illustrated these methods on brain tumor volume cases using MR imaging modality.