3D segmentation of masses in DCE-MRI images using FCM and adaptive MRF

Dynamic contrast enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) is a sensitive imaging modality for the detection of breast cancer. Automated segmentation of breast lesions in DCE-MRI images is challenging due to inherent signal-to-noise ratios and high inter-patient variability. A novel 3D segmentation method based on FCM and MRF is proposed in this study. In this method, a MRI image is segmented by spatial FCM, firstly. And then MRF segmentation is conducted to refine the result. We combined with the 3D information of lesion in the MRF segmentation process by using segmentation result of contiguous slices to constraint the slice segmentation. At the same time, a membership matrix of FCM segmentation result is used for adaptive adjustment of Markov parameters in MRF segmentation process. The proposed method was applied for lesion segmentation on 145 breast DCE-MRI examinations (86 malignant and 59 benign cases). An evaluation of segmentation was taken using the traditional overlap rate method between the segmented region and hand-drawing ground truth. The average overlap rates for benign and malignant lesions are 0.764 and 0.755 respectively. Then we extracted five features based on the segmentation region, and used an artificial neural network (ANN) to classify between malignant and benign cases. The ANN had a classification performance measured by the area under the ROC curve of AUC=0.73. The positive and negative predictive values were 0.86 and 0.58, respectively. The results demonstrate the proposed method not only achieves a better segmentation performance in accuracy also has a reasonable classification performance.