Automatic Brain Cancer Segmentation on PET Image

Abstract

When treating a brain tumor, a doctor needs to know the site and the size of the tumor. Positron emission tomography (PET) can be effectively applied to diagnose such cancers based on the heightened glucose metabolism of early-stage cancer cells. The purpose of this research is to extract the regions of skull, brain tumor, and brain tissue from a series of PET brain images and then a three-dimensional (3D) model is reconstructed from the extracted skulls, brain tumors, and brain tissues. Knowing the relative site and size of a tumor within the skull is helpful to a doctor. The contours obtained by the segmentation method proposed in this study are quantitatively compared with the contours drawn by doctors on the same image set since the ground truth is unknown. The experimental results are impressive.