Brain Tumor Detection Based on a Novel and High-Quality Prediction of the Tumor Pixel Distributions

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a system to detect brain tumor in 3D MRI brain scans of Flair modality. It performs 2 functions: (a) predicting gray-level and locational distributions of the pixels in the tumor regions and (b) generating tumor mask in pixel-wise precision. To facilitate 3D data analysis and processing, we introduced a 2D histogram presentation that comprehends the gray-level distribution and pixel-location distribution of a 3D object. In the proposed system, particular 2D histograms, in which tumor-related feature data get concentrated, are established by exploiting the left-right asymmetry of a brain structure. A modulation function is generated from the input data of each patient case and applied to the 2D histograms to attenuate the element irrelevant to the tumor regions. The prediction of the tumor pixel distribution is done in 3 steps, on the axial, coronal and sagittal slice series, respectively. In each step, the prediction result helps to identify/remove tumor-free slices, increasing the tumor information density in the remaining data to be applied to the next step. After the 3-step removal, the 3D input is reduced to a minimum bounding box of the tumor region. It is used to finalize the prediction and then transformed into a 3D tumor mask, by means of gray level thresholding and low-pass-based morphological operations. The final prediction result is used to determine the critical threshold. The proposed system has been tested extensively with the data of more than one thousand patient cases in the datasets of BraTS 2018~21. The test results demonstrate that the predicted 2D histograms have a high degree of similarity with the true ones. The system delivers also very good tumor detection results, comparable to those of state-of-the-art CNN systems with mono-modality inputs, which is achieved at an extremely low computation cost and no need for training.