Automatic 3D Detection and Segmentation of Head and Neck Cancer from MRI Data

A novel algorithm for automatic head and neck 3D tumour segmentation from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is presented. The proposed algorithm pre-processes the MRI data slices to enhance quality and reduce artefacts. An intensity standardisation process is performed between slices, followed by cancer region segmentation of central slice, to get the correct intensity range and rough location of tumour regions. Fourier interpolation is applied to create isotropic 3D MRI volume. A new location-constrained 3D level set method segments the tumour from the interpolated MRI volume. The proposed algorithm is tested on real MRI data. The results show that the novel 3D tumour volume extraction algorithm has an improved dice score and F-measure when compared to the previous 2D and 3D segmentation method.