ABSTRACT

A stochastic model for characterizing tumor texture in brain MR images is proposed. The efficacy of the model is demonstrated in patient-independent brain tumor texture feature extraction and tumor segmentation in magnetic resonance images (MRIs). Due to complex appearance in MRI, brain tumor texture is formulated using a multiresolution-fractal model known as multi-fractional Brownian motion (mBm). Detailed mathematical derivation for mBm model and corresponding novel algorithm to extract spatially-varying multi-fractal features are proposed. A multifractal feature-based brain tumor segmentation method is developed next. To evaluate efficacy, tumor segmentation performance using proposed multi-fractal feature is compared with that using Gabor like multi-scale texton feature. Furthermore, novel patient-independent tumor segmentation scheme is proposed by extending the well-known AdaBoost algorithm. The modification of AdaBoost algorithm involves assigning weights to component classifiers based on their ability to classify difficult samples and confidence in such classification.