Automatic glioma segmentation based on adaptive superpixel.

Background: The automatic glioma segmentation is of great significance for clinical practice. This study aims to propose an automatic method based on superpixel for glioma segmentation from the T2 weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

Methods: The proposed method mainly includes three steps. First, we propose an adaptive superpixel generation algorithm based on simple linear iterative clustering version with 0 parameter (ASLIC0). This algorithm can acquire a superpixel image with fewer superpixels and better fit the boundary of region of interest (ROI) by automatically selecting the optimal number of superpixels. Second, we compose a training set by calculating the statistical, texture, curvature and fractal features for each superpixel. Third, Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used to train classification model based on the features of the second step.

Results: The experimental results on Multimodal Brain Tumor Image Segmentation Benchmark 2017 (BraTS2017) show that the proposed method has good segmentation performance. The average Dice, Hausdorff distance, sensitivity, and specificity for the segmented tumor against the ground truth are 0.8492, 3.4697 pixels, 81.47, and 99.64%, respectively. The proposed method shows good stability on high- and low-grade glioma samples. Comparative experimental results show that the proposed method has superior performance.

Conclusions: This provides a close match to expert delineation across all grades of glioma, leading to a fast and reproducible method of glioma segmentation.