Evaluation method for MRI brain tissue abnormalities segmentation study

Segmentation poses one of the most challenging problems in medical imaging. Segmentation of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) images is an important part of brain imaging research as it can facilitates the neurological diseases diagnosis. However, there are few limitations in evaluating the segmentation accuracy due to difficulties in obtaining the ground truth. This research proposes an evaluation method for brain tissue abnormalities segmentation study. Controlled experimental data called mosaic images are used as the testing data. The data is designed which that prior knowledge of the size of the abnormalities is known. It is done by cutting various shapes and sizes of various abnormalities and pasting it onto normal brain tissues, where the tissues and the background are divided into three different intensities. The knowledge of the size of abnormalities by number of pixels are then used as the ground truth to compare with the various segmentation results. The validation of segmentation was done with fifty data of each category using methods of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Adaptive Network-based Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) and Fuzzy c-Means (FCM), where the evaluation for each technique exhibits some variation of results. Therefore, the proposed evaluation method of ground truth formation called image mosaicing is found to be reasonable and acceptable to use as it produces potential solutions to the current difficulties in evaluating the brain tissue abnormalities segmentation outcome.

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