Automatic brain tumor extraction using fuzzy information fusion

摘要

This paper presents a fuzzy information fusion method to automatically extract tumor areas of human brain from multispectral magnetic resonance (MR) images. The multispectral images consist of T1 -weighted (T1), proton density (PD), and 72-weighted (T2) feature images, in which signal intensities of a tumor are different. Some tissue is more visible in one image type than the others. The fusion of information is therefore necessary. Our method, based on the fusion of information, model the fuzzy information about the tumor by membership functions. Thismodelisation is based on the a priori knowledge of radiology experts and the MR signals of the brain tissues. Three membership functions related to the three images types are proposed according to their characteristics. The brain extraction is then carried out by using the fusion of all three fuzzy information. The experimental results (based on 5 patients studied) show a mean false-negative of 2% and a mean false-positive of 1.3%, comparing to the results obtained by a radiology using manual tracing.