A Comprehensive Brain MRI Image Segmentation System Based on Contourlet Transform and Deep Neural Networks

Abstract

Brain tumors are one of the deadliest types of cancer. Rapid and accurate identification of brain tumors, followed by appropriate surgical intervention or chemotherapy, increases the probability of survival. Accurate determination of brain tumors in MRI scans determines the exact location of surgical intervention or chemotherapy. However, this accurate segmentation of brain tumors, due to their diverse morphologies in MRI scans, poses challenges that require significant expertise and accuracy in image interpretation. Despite significant advances in this field, there are several barriers to proper data collection, particularly in the medical sciences, due to concerns about the confidentiality of patient information. However, research papers for learning systems and proposed networks often rely on standardized datasets because a specific approach is unavailable. This system combines unsupervised learning in the adversarial generative network component with supervised learning in segmentation networks. The system is fully automated and can be applied to tumor segmentation on various datasets, including those with sparse data. In order to improve the learning process, the brain MRI segmentation network is trained using a generative adversarial network to increase the number of images. The U-Net model was employed during the segmentation step to combine the remaining blocks efficiently. Contourlet transform produces the ground truth for each MRI image obtained from the adversarial generator network and the original images in the processing and mask preparation phase. On the part of the adversarial generator network, high-quality images are produced, the results of which are similar to the histogram of the original images. Finally, this system improves the image segmentation performance by combining the remaining blocks with the U-net network. Segmentation is evaluated using brain magnetic resonance images obtained from Istanbul Medipol Hospital. The results show that the proposed method and image segmentation network, which incorporates several criteria, such as the DICE criterion of 0.9434, can be effectively used in any dataset as a fully automatic system for segmenting different brain MRI images.

Keywords

• brain tumor
• generative adversarial network
• U-Net
• residual block
• contourlet transform
• segmentation