An unsupervised learning method with a clustering approach for tumor identification and tissue segmentation in magnetic resonance brain images

•Novel SOM based FKM algorithm for tissue segmentation and tumor identification in magnetic resonance brain images (T1-w, T2-w, FLAIR and MPR sequences) is proposed through this work.•Exact demarcation between tumor and edema region is characterized.•Validation of the segmented results by an experienced radiologist.•Cross comparison with FCM, SOM, FKM and other hybrid clustering algorithms using ten standard comparison parameters.

Malignant and benign types of tumor infiltrated in human brain are diagnosed with the help of an MRI scanner. With the slice images obtained using an MRI scanner, certain image processing techniques are utilized to have a clear anatomy of brain tissues. One such image processing technique is hybrid self-organizing map (SOM) with fuzzy K means (FKM) algorithm, which offers successful identification of tumor and good segmentation of tissue regions present inside the tissues of brain. The proposed algorithm is efficient in terms of Jaccard Index, Dice Overlap Index (DOI), sensitivity, specificity, peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), mean square error (MSE), computational time and memory requirement. The algorithm proposed through this paper has better data handling capacities and it also performs efficient processing upon the input magnetic resonance (MR) brain images. Automatic detection of tumor region in MR (magnetic resonance) brain images has a high impact in helping the radio surgeons assess the size of the tumor present inside the tissues of brain and it also supports in identifying the exact topographical location of tumor region. The proposed hybrid SOM-FKM algorithm assists the radio surgeon by providing an automated tissue segmentation and tumor identification, thus enhancing radio therapeutic procedures. The efficiency of the proposed technique is verified using the clinical images obtained from four patients, along with the images taken from Harvard Brain Repository.

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