Iterative Multilevel MRF Leveraging Context and Voxel Information for Brain Tumour Segmentation in MRI

In this paper, we introduce a fully automated multistage graphical probabilistic framework to segment brain tumours from multimodal Magnetic Resonance Images (MRIs) acquired from real patients. An initial Bayesian tumour classification based on Gabor texture features permits subsequent computations to be focused on areas where the probability of tumour is deemed high. An iterative, multistage Markov Random Field (MRF) framework is then devised to classify the various tumour subclasses (e.g. edema, solid tumour, enhancing tumour and necrotic core). Specifically, an adapted, voxel-based MRF provides tumour candidates to a higher level, regional MRF, which then leverages both contextual texture information and relative spatial consistency of the tumour subclass positions to provide updated regional information down to the voxel-based MRF for further local refinement. The two stages iterate until convergence. Experiments are performed on publicly available, patient brain tumour images from the MICCAI 2012 [11] and 2013 [12] Brain Tumour Segmentation Challenges. The results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the top performance in the segmentation of tumour cores and enhancing tumours, and performs comparably to the winners in other tumour categories.