Whole Tumor Area Estimation in Incremental Brain MRI Using Dilation and Erosion-Based Binary Morphing

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology is rapidly advancing and three-dimensional (3D) scanners started to play an important role on diagnosis. However, not every medical center has access to 3D magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) devices; therefore, it is safe to state that the majority of MRI scans are still two-dimensional. According to the setup values adjusted before any scan, there might be consistent gaps between the MRI slices, especially when the increment value exceeds the thickness. The gap causes miscalculation of the lesion volumes and misjudgments when the lesions are reconstructed in three-dimensional space due to excessive interpolation. Therefore, in this paper, we present the details of three types of conventional morphing methods, one dilation-based and two erosion-based, and compare them to figure out which one provides better solution for filling up the gaps in incremental brain MRI. Among three types of morphing methods, the highest average dice score coefficient (DSC) is calculated as %91.95, which is obtained by the multiplicative dilation morphing method for HG/0004 set of BraTS 2012.