Image Filtering Using Anisotropic Diffusion for Brain Tumor Detection

1. Introduction

Human brain is called as the Central Processing Unit (CPU) of a human body, just as CPU does all the processing of the information received, brain exactly does the processing of the signals received by it. Brain tumor is a most critical condition of a human brain, which causes due to the collection of abnormal tissues in the human brain. These tissues can lead to Edema when they enlarge and increase the pressure in the human brain. Tumor in human brain can be considered in mainly two types called primary tumor and metastatic tumor. Tumors formed in the tissues of the human brain or in the vicinity of the brain are primary tumors whereas the tumors which originate in the specific area and stretch out to the brain of a person are metastatic tumors. Glioma which is found in brain’s supporting cells is mostly affecting in adults. According to The World Health Organisation (W.H.O.), as mentioned in Johns Hopkins medicine article called Brain tumors and brain cancer, the tumor can be catagorized into 4 grades.

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  The tumor cells which have slow growth rate, long lifespan, and resemble the normal cell are considered as grade I.

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  The tumor cells which outspread to the nearby tissues, and can upturn in a much upper grade being deadly, and have a peculiar appearance belong to grade II.

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  The tumor cells which actively spread around them having an abnormal appearance which could also come back are considered in grade III.

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  The tumor cells which are fully abnormal and multiply rapidly belong to grade IV.

The tumor cell formation and appearance are different in each of the grade I, II, III, and IV hence it is crucial to recognize the position of the tumor and also its exact dimensions, grounded on this the doctors can begin the treatment. If the identification of the tumor is inaccurate then the treatment can go erroneous. We can avoid this tedious job of a doctor by providing a simple and easy solution by using the Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) which not only helps doctors in finding the location of the tumor area but also provides the size of tumor.

1.1 Brain tumor Symptoms

An individual having tumor in brain express a couple of symptoms depending upon few factors namely growth rate of the tumor, the size and location of the brain tumor areas i.e frontal lobe (power to sense the smell, personality and movement), parietal lobe (sense of touch and pain, object identification, body position and navigation), temporal lobe (memory and speech power), occipital lobe(power of vision), pons or medulla (lung and heart control) as can be perceived in figure 1 referred from Johns Hopkins medicine article, Brain tumors and brain cancer. The position of the tumor in the human brain says which activity of the person controlled by brain will be affected. Person with brain tumor suffer with symptoms like headache, nausea/vomiting, can suffer with visual problems, difficulty in the movement of legs and arms, speaking difficulty, physical and mental imbalance in everyday activities. These symptoms can only be identified by a doctor stating whether it’s a symptom of tumor or is it because of some other issues as stated by Northwestern UniversityFeinberg School of Medicine.

Figure 1.

Human brain regions and their role on human body function