Segmentation of Tumor In MRI Brain Images And Classification Using Neural NetworK

Suganya.R & Mohandas. R

#1,2

Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Jayaram College of Engineering and Technology, Tiruchirapalli, Tamil Nadu, India E-mail : Suga.eng@gmail.com,mohandas.be@gmail.com

Abstract - The aim of this paper is to introduce a novel semi supervised scheme for abnormality detection and segmentation in medical images. Semi supervised learning does not require pathology modeling and, thus, allows high degree of automation. In abnormality detection, a vector is characterized as anomalous if it does not comply with the probability distribution obtained from normal data. The estimation of the probability density function, however, is usually not feasible due to large data dimensionality. In order to overcome this challenge, we treat every image as a network of locally coherent image partitions (overlapping blocks).For each block, the parameters are estimated like energy, PCA, maximization and the dissimilarity criterion. Based on these parameters the abnormal block is estimated and the estimated block is segmented using EM algorithm. From the segmented tumor the statistical features such as energy, entropy, standard deviation, mean, variance etc are estimated and these features are trained using feed forward network back propogation algorithm and classified to what type the segment tumor belongs. Keywords Abnormality detection, brain pathology, distributed estimation, image segmentation, statistical modeling, neural classification.

segmenting pathologies in brain images, such as lesions, brain infarction, or dysplasia. In contrast to most brain lesion segmentation methods based on outlier detection, the proposed method is generic. Most anomaly detection methods in image processing extract a few discriminatory features from regions of interest assuming data stationary , in order to classify anomaly rather than segment anomaly.

Fig. 1. Axial MR slices of normal brain illustrating the remaining variability after spatial normalization.

I.

INTRODUCTION

The collection of data of the same kind allows the construction and exploitation of application-specific statistical models that optimally summarize knowledge. Such models can be incorporated into frameworks for anomaly or outlier detection, and model-based segmentation. Most methods, developed for segmenting anomalies, use labeled samples to characterize the abnormal objects. Semi supervised anomaly accurate way requires substantial human effort and is often detection offers a solution to this problem by modeling normal data and then using a distance measure and thresholding to determine abnormality. The best description of normality, in the statistical sense, is the unconditional probability density function (pdf) for the normal data. The method is applied for automatically

In contrast to most brain lesion segmentation methods based on outlier detection, the proposed method is generic.Most anomaly detection methods in image processing extract a few discriminatory features from regions of interest assuming data stationarity, in order to classify anomaly rather than segment anomaly. we partition the images into subspaces, i.e., locally coherent overlapping blocks. It is assumed that for each location the blocks are generated from a Gaussian distribution and located in a tight cluster. These subspaces are then modeled by a linear method, such as principal component analysis (PCA). some anomaly detection methods, referred to as spectral techniques in, also determine subspaces these methods are based on the assumption that normal and abnormal instances can be easier separated in a lower dimensional embedding space, whereas other methods project into a subspace constructed by normal samples (referred to as normal subspace) and measure degree of anomaly based on the residual component, i.e., the part that is not explained by the model. Our method differs from these methods in

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that 1) the embedding space is not constructed from the whole data, but from image partitions and 2) it seeks the separation within both, normal subspace, and residual subspace, i.e., it retains all dimensions of the original space (for each block). Data fusion is performed by applying a distributed estimation algorithm based on dual decomposition and developed for solving largescale problems. Finally the neural classification step is performed together with an estimate of the position and the shape for each lesion. Classification is implemented using a multi-layer perceptron as a way to code the prior knowledge about clinical features of a tumor segment and to obtain fast performance. The network has been trained using a back-propagation scheme. The proposed approach is comprehensively evaluated using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis. II. METHODS The methodology for abnormality segmentation uses 1) a set of pathology-free images in order to calculate an objective function measuring similarity to a healthy brain and 2) a test image (with abnormalities) for which the objective function is maximized. All images are co registered and the mean image is calculated and subtracted from them. After merging the solutions of all blocks, a spatial abnormality score map is calculated for the whole image by subtracting the reconstructed image from the original one. In the classification step we have defined a set of measures that characterize a possible lesion object.The architecture of the classifier trained using the backpropagation algorithm. A. Formulation of the Objective Function Since anomalies are defined as points with low probability density, it is expected to estimate by maximizing the pdf obtained for the normal data. However, if the vector is high dimensional, the estimation of the pdf is not feasible. Therefore, we will maximize the pdf in a lower dimensional space p(u),where u is the representation of x in a basis W: u=x (1) Here x is a column vector assumed to be centered at the origin and T denotes the matrix transpose. If the KarhunenLo`eve (KL) transform (or PCA) is applied, the basis W is formed by the (d d) matrix of the eigenvectors of the covariance matrix C of the training set V, i.e., C = (1/n 1) V . The KL transform can be inverted as follows: x = Wu. Assuming that x follows a multivariate Gaussian distribution, the density of u is the multivariate Gaussian density:

(2)

where D =W CW = diag(1 , 2, . . . , d ) is a (d d) diagonal matrix of eigen values, assumed to be sorted in descending order. the number of samples is significantly smaller than the dimensionality in which case the eigen values t , with t n, are zero and the corresponding eigenvectors in W are ignored.If all other eigenvectors are retained, u Rn1. According to (2), p(u) is maximized when (1/2)uT D1u is minimized. Based on maximization of the density in respect to x then is equivalent to minimizing the following term: (3) Since u is lower dimensional than x, there exist an infinite number of data points x Rd with the same function cost value.The second energy term expresses the distance to the projected point x 0W:
(4)

where- denotes the L2-norm. If x = x0 , this term expresses the reconstruction error or residual The first two terms statistically model normality and are used to make the image look like if abnormality were removed. If all voxels are equally possible to be abnormal, then the distance from x0 can be used as dissimilarity criterion: (5) where j indicates the voxels in the image. The previous three terms are combined into a single objective function, l(x) by using different weights, shown as follows:

(6) B. Optimization of the Objective Function The objective function can be written in the form of a quadratic programming problem without any linear (equality or inequality) constraints;

(7)

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where bl , bu are lower and upper bounds on x, H is a (d d) positive semide finite symmetric matrix, and f is a d-element column vector.

where the loglikelihood function is given by the negative objective function of . In order to extract yi from xi ,

(8)

(9) where Hi = H and is calculated from (8) for block i, and fi =f + Mvi. III. NEURAL CLASSIFICATION
Figure.2.2 Illustration of private and public variables. The public variables for block1 are all in constraint C1 whereas the public variables for block2 are in constraints C1 or in constraint C2.

where I is the (d d) identity matrix, D1r =diag(1/1 , 1/2), is the inverse diagonal matrix of the largest eigen values retained and Wr the matrix of the corresponding retained eigenvectors. C. Distributed Estimation The maximum likelihood estimation problem in a distributed setting is solved using dual decomposition based on the algorithm presented in and also described here briefly for completeness. Let us assume that k blocks (partitions) are extracted from an image and that the k blocks are coupled through nc consistency constraints that require the image intensities in overlapping voxels to be equal.The variables that are constraint to be equal across different blocks are denoted as public variables. The variables that are local to each block and are not common in other blocks are denoted as private variables.

After the system locates all potential sclerosis objects, some suitable numeric features are derived for each object in order to set up a suitable input for the neural classifier. There is no need to use AI approaches because we can fully represent our knowledge at a subsymbolic level, in terms of the shape, position, and brightness of each cadidate. The 16 measures weve used for classification are grouped in four categories: area and type label deriving from the locating step; differences between object brightness and WM and GM mean and maximum brightness value in both T2 and PD images; shape measures: a roundness coefficient measuring the ratio between the pixels of the object, and those belonging to its minimum enclosing box; the ratio between the maximum and minimum axis of the object. position measures: the distances between the center of the object and the contour of the brain, its median axis, and its center. The classifier has been set up as a perceptron trained with the back-propagation algorithm. classifierbased on the maximization of a parametric cost function: c(x)=i Wi j Wij f j(xj) (10)

Figure. 2.3 Algorithm solving the maximum likelihood estimation problem in a distributed setting using a subgradient method. D. Implementation The optimization for each block in can be written as a quadratic programming problem in respect to xi ,

Here mi is the mean value of xi over the whole training set, while k is a suitable constant. For the distance features we adopted the gaussian function whose mean value and standard deviation where computed for each xi over the entire training set. There is no theoretical foundation for this choice except that
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we have found a relevant improvement in classification performance with respect to simply summing up the inputs. The training set for both classifiers, is extracted from 50 image couples and made up by 4557 objects with 212 sclerosis lesions: all these objects have been assessed by a doctor. The test set has been made using 20 image couples not presented during the learning phase, and contains 1902 candidates with 84 sclerosis lesions and 1818 nonsclerosis objects. The threshold for neural classification has been experimentally set at 0.25. Table 1 reports the training and test scores of both classifiers, respectively for sclerosis objects (SO) and not-sclerosis objects (NSO) while figure :4 shows some experimental classification results.

lesions. Brain lesions might be associated with several diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, traumatic brain injury, or some cardiovascular disease.

Fig. 4. Six examples of 2-D simulated brain images with added pathology. Early results are satisfactory: the percentage classification error is strongly enhanced with respect to the non-neural classifier in both the training and test phase. Besides, the network has performed a correct generalization. The lower percentage score for the sclerosis objects classification is due to the difficult detection of the smallest lesions that are hard to discern from the rest of the image. The higher percentage error on the sclerosis objects is due to the difficult classification of the smallest lesions that are hard to discern from the rest of the image. IV. EXPERIMENTS The method is assessed on simulated and real MR brain images with pathology. The simulated data include three types of pathology: 1) white matter and periventricular lesions, 2) infarcts, and 3) dysplasia, whereas the real data include mostly pathology of the first type. White matter lesion patterns are very heterogeneous, ranging from punctuate lesions in the deep white matter to large confluent periventricular Many methods in the literature have been developed for the detection of brain lesions using MRI. They usually apply supervised neural classification in which the desired segmentation is known (expert manual delineation) and used as a training set to build the segmentation model [15]. A. Simulated Data A set of images (axial slices) with dimension 128 128 voxels is created and used for constructing the statistical model of normal brain variability. The slices consist of a simplified model of white matter and ventricles, whereas gray matter is not included in the model. Variability in the dataset is introduced by randomly selecting the shape of head and ventricles. The shape of the head is parameterized by the location and size of an ellipse,while the shape of the ventricles is parameterized by the curvature, thickness, distance between left and right ventricle and asymmetry in anteriorposterior level. All these parameters are randomly selected assuming to follow a Gaussian distribution. Contrast is added in the two shapes as a sum of uniform gray level and white Gaussian noise.

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B. Real Data The real data consist of axial FLAIR scans obtained fromelderly individuals with diabetes [17]. They are acquired with a 3-mm slice thickness, no slice gap, a 240 240mm FOV and a 256256 scan matrix. The data preprocessing steps include image smoothing, skull-stripping to extract the brain region [18], inhomogeneity correction [19], intensity normalization based on histogram matching, and deformable registration to a common space (template image). Intensity normalization is an important preprocessing step that standardizes the histograms of all training and test images. To this end, a linear transformation (translation and scaling) is calculated that minimizes the L2-norm of the histogram difference between transformed image and template image. The histograms are first smoothed and the bin representing the background is excluded from the least-squares error minimization. Spatial normalization is performed by a deformable registration algorithm designed for brain images.

IV. RESULT

V. CONCLUSION Image partitioning combined with a distributed estimation algorithm has been applied to deal with the high dimensional problem of statistical modeling. The constructed statistical model of normal brain images has been applied to the segmentation of brain pathologies. statistical parameters like Harlick features can be estimated and the type of tumor can be classified using artificial neural networks. VI. REFERENCES [1] M. Markou and S. Singh, Novelty detection: A review. Part 1: Statistical approaches, Signal Process., vol. 83, pp. 24812497, 2003. V. Chandola, A. Banerjee, and V. Kumar, Anomaly detection: A survey,ACM Comput. Surveys, vol. 41, no. 3, pp. 172, 2009. L. Tarassenko, P. Hayton, N. Cerneaz, and M. Brady, Novelty detection for the identification of masses in mammograms, in 4th Int. Conf. Artif.Neural Netw., 1995, vol. 4, pp. 442447. M. L. Seghier, A. Ramlackhansingh, J. Crinion, A. P. Leff, and C. J. Price, Lesion identification using unified segmentation-normalisation, NeuroImage,vol. 41, pp. 12531266, 2008. S. Shen, A. J. Szameitat, and A. Sterr, Detection of infarct lesions from single MRI modality using inconsistency between voxel intensity and spatial locationA 3-D automatic approach, IEEE Trans. Inf. Technol.Biomed., vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 532540, Jul. 2008. K.Van Leemput, F.Maes, D.Vandermeulen, A.Colchester, and P. Suetens, Automated segmentation of multiple sclerosis lesions by model outlier detection, IEEE Trans. Med. Imag., vol. 20, no. 8, pp. 677688, Aug2001.

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Fig. 5. Segmentation of white matter lesions on a diabetes patient.

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Fig. 6. Assessment of the proposed method (with w1 = w2 = w3) on simulated (top) and real data (bottom).

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