Fast and Accurate Semi-Automatic Segmentation Tool for Brain Tumor MRIs

Abstract

Segmentation, the process of delineating tumor apart from healthy tissue, is a vital part of both the clinical assessment and the quantitative analysis of brain cancers. Here, we provide an open-source algorithm (MITKats), built on the Medical Imaging Interaction Toolkit, to provide user-friendly and expedient tools for semi-automatic segmentation. To evaluate its performance against competing algorithms, we applied MITKats to 38 high-grade glioma cases from publicly available benchmarks. The similarity of the segmentations to expert-delineated ground truths approached the discrepancies among different manual raters, the theoretically maximal precision. The average time spent on each segmentation was 5 minutes, making MITKats between 4 and 11 times faster than competing semi-automatic algorithms, while retaining similar accuracy.