Semi-automatic segmentation and analysis of GBM brain tumors in magnetic resonance images

Segmentation of tumors in magnetic resonance images is an important task. However, it is quite time consuming and has low accuracy and reproducibility when performed manually. Automating the process is challenging, due to high diversity in appearance of tumor tissue in different patients and in many cases, similarity between tumor and normal tissues. This paper presents semi-automatic approach for analysis of multi-parametric magnetic resonance images (MRI) to segment a highly malignant brain tumor called Glioblastoma multiform (GBM). MRI studies of 12 patients with GBM tumors are used. To show that the proposed method identifies Gd-enhanced tumor pixels from T1-post contrast images minimal user interactions. They are also used to illustrate that the segmentation results obtained by the proposed approach are close to those of an expert, by showing excellent correlations among them (R2=0.97). In order to evaluate the proposed method in practical applications, effects of treatment of GBM brain tumors using Bevacizumab are predicted. Bevacizumab is a recent therapy for stopping tumor growth and even shrinking tumor through inhibition of vascular development (angiogenesis). To this end, two image series of 12 patients before and after treatment and relative changes in the volumes of the Gd-enhanced regions in T1-post contrast images are used as measure of response. The proposed method applies signal decomposition with KNN classifier to minimize user interactions and increase reproducibility of the results. Then histogram analysis is applied to extract statistical features from Gd-enhanced regions of tumor and quantify its micro structural characteristics. Predictive models developed in this work have large regression coefficients (maximum R2=0.91) indicating their capability to predict response to therapy. The results obtained by the proposed approach are compared with those of previous work where excellent correlations are obtained.