Modified technique for volumetric brain tumor measurements

Abstract

Quantitative measurements of tumor response rate in three dimensions (3D) become more re-alistic with the use of advanced technology im-aging during therapy, especially when the tumor morphological changes remain subtle, irregular and difficult to assess by clinical examination. These quantitative measurements depend strongly on the accuracy of the segmentations methods used. Improvements on such methods yield to increase the accuracy of the segmentation process. Recently, the essential modification in the Traditional Region Growing (T-RG) method has been developed and a “Modified Region Growing Method” (MRGM) has been presented and gives more accurate boundary detection and holes filling after segmentation. In this pa-per, the new automatic calculation of the volu-metric size of brain tumor has been imple-mented based on Modified Region Growing Method. A comparative study and statistical analysis performed in this work show that the modified method gives more accurate and better performance for 3D volume measurements. The method was tested by 7 fully investigated pa-tients of different tumor type and shape, and better accurate results were reported using MRGM.