The Detection of Brain Tumors Using Chan-Vese Active Contour Without Edges Method in Magnetic Resonance (MR) Images

Abstract

Accurate and automatic detections of brain tumors are vital. The aim of this study is to detect brain tumors in Magnetic Resonance (MR) images and to classify these tumors with a high degree of accuracy. After removing skull, the suspicious regions including tumors in the MR images were detected by using K-means clustering, K-means clustering in Lab color space, and the Chan-Vese without edges algorithm. At this stage, a performance evaluation of these three different methods was investigated, and it was seen that the best result was obtained in the Chan-Vese active contour without edges algorithm. For the classification stage, various features such as shape-based features, gray level co-occurrence matrix features, histogram of oriented gradients features, local binary pattern features, and statistical features were extracted from the detected suspicious regions. Finally, the suspicious regions were classified by k-nearest neighbor (k-NN), Fisher’s linear discriminant analysis (FLDA), random forest, decision tree, support vector machines (SVM), logistic linear classifier (LLC), and Naive Bayes classification methods. As a result of this study, it was determined that the FLDA classifier provided the best results with 93.01% accuracy, 93.46% sensitivity, and 96.50% specificity rates in classification for benign tumors, malignant tumors, and healthy (without tumor) cases.