| Object Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) brain tumor is
heterogeneous in nature, so its quantification depends on
how to accurately segment different parts of the tumor, i.e.
viable tumor, edema and necrosis. This procedure becomes
more effective when metabolic and functional information,
provided by physiological magnetic resonance (MR) imaging modalities, like diffusion-weighted-imaging (DWI) and
perfusion-weighted-imaging (PWI), is incorporated with the
anatomical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In this preliminary tumor quantification work, the idea is to characterize different regions of GBM tumors in an MRI-based
semi-automatic multi-parametric approach to achieve more
accurate characterization of pathogenic regions.
Materials and methods For this purpose, three MR
sequences, namely T2-weighted imaging (anatomical MR
imaging), PWI and DWI of thirteen GBM patients, were
acquired. To enhance the delineation of the boundaries of
each pathogenic region (peri-tumoral edema, viable tumor
and necrosis), the spatial fuzzy C-means algorithm is
combined with the region growing method.
Results The results show that exploiting the multi-parametric approach along with the proposed semi-automatic
segmentation method can differentiate various tumorous
regions with over 80 % sensitivity, specificity and dice
score.
Conclusion The proposed MRI-based multi-parametric
segmentation approach has the potential to accurately
segment tumorous regions, leading to an efficient design of
the pre-surgical treatment planning |