A Survey of MRI Segmentation Techniques for Brain Tumor Studies

Brain tumor is one of the advancing brain illness among the existing population. The causes of the condition being non-deterministic, it is found that the survival rates of people suffering from brain tumor is very less. This medical condition lacks effective treatment and thus approaches that enable efficient treatment planning of the brain tumor is very crucial in the current context. Magnetic resonance image (MRI) scans are widely used in the diagnosis and subsequent treatment planning of the brain tumors. While in most of the cases only tumor regions are segregated from the MRI scans, segmentation of the tumor along with the healthy tissues of the brain such as white matter, gray matter and cerebrospinal fluid enable doctors to study the overall medical condition of the patient and treat him accordingly. The overall segmentation procedure includes noise removal, skull stripping, feature extraction and actual segmentation of various brain regions. Several methods used for each of these stages are discussed in this paper. The advantages and drawbacks of each of them are also highlighted.