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International Journal of Engineering & Technology, 7 (2.21) (2018) 140-143
International Journal of Engineering & Technology
Website: www.sciencepubco.com/index.php/IJET
Research paper
Automatic segmentation of chondroblastoma from X-ray images
using active contour and levelset method
P.Y. Muhammed Anshad
1*
, Dr. S.S. Kumar
2
1
Research Scholar, Department of Electronics & Communication, Noorul Islam University, India
2
Associate Professor, Electronics and Instrumentation, Noorul Islam University, India
*Corresponding author E-mail: anshadpy@gmail.com
Abstract
Chondroblastoma is a benign but locally aggressive bone tumor found usually in the age below 25 years. Chondroblastoma is a
destructive type of lesion with a thin radio dense border which is normally seen in the epiphysis of long bones. The benign tumors have
similarities in pathology and could be related with histogenic similarity. This tumor reduces the strength of affected bone and may leads
to death if not treated early. Chondroblastoma can be diagnosed from X-ray/CT/MRI images and the treatment is its removal by surgical
methods. Diagnosis of Chondroblastoma is difficult due to the similarities with other benign tumors like chondromyxoid fibroma. To
reduce diagnostic errors, computer aided methods can adopt. This work focuses on automatic segmentation of Chondroblastoma using
active contour and level set method which gives better segmentation results and a mild stone to CAD design.
Keywords: Chondroblastoma, computer aided methods, segmentation, active contour, levelset method, CAD,
1. Introduction
Chondroblastoma is a benign bone tumor most frequently arise in
the epiphyses of long bones, with 75% occurring in the humerus
area. They tumor size commonly seen is 3-4 cm. Figure 1 shows
the anatomy of normal knee and Chondroblastoma affected knee.
It clearly shows some lesion around the cartilage area.
Chondroblastoma is diagnosed from X-ray/CT images and the
tumor can be removed by surgical method. In the proposed
method, the system can identify tumor area using automatic seed
point selection method, can identify the region of interest (ROI)
using segmentation method and can calculate the volume of ROI
which assists the doctors for the successful removal of tumor.
Figure 1: a). Normal knee anatomy b). Chondroblastoma affected knee
In most of theimage based diagnostic operations need individual
objects to be divided into different from the image. Image
segmentation is a fundamental task which is responsible for the
separation of different parts using homogeneity. The job of
segmentation is to divide an image into its basic and disjoint sub-
regions that are identical based on their properties like color,
quality, intensity etc. Segmentation algorithms are commonly
based on either discontinuity or similarity with sub regions. The
purpose of segmentation is to divide an image into different sub-
regions. The role of classification is to identify the divided sub-
regions. Thus, segmentation and classification are general
functions as individual and sequential process. Active contours
work on the basis of relaxation [1] methods, and this valid to
different image segmentation issues. Active contours also can be
used for image segmentation and boundary tracking in snakes by
Kass et al. [2]. The basic idea is to start with initial boundary
shapes which is represented in a type of enclosed curves. The
contours are iteratively change them by applying expansion or
shrink operations based on the constraints of images. These are
called contour evolution and made by the minimization of some
energy function like fixed region based segmentation methods [3].
2. Background
In the area of medicine, diagnosis is one of the biggest and
fundamental task to start treatment. There is a well-developed
system already available in the field of diagnosis like X-Ray,
MRI, CT etc. These machineries only provide the images of the
affected area for diagnosis. The decision is still manual in most of
the cases. This may increase the possibility of misdiagnosis. Here
comes the importance of CAD system. Now a day’s more
researches going on in the field of CAD. Segmentation is one of
the difficult and important area in CAD systems. There is a variety
of segmentation methods available. This is possible to use
semiautomatic or fully automatic segmentation methods which
depend on the area or method of segmentation. Bone tumor
images varies in size, shapes, position and its appearance. It’s
based on reducing an object function by updating membership
function to cluster centers. The object function used here is the
weighted sum of distances from cluster centers. The weighted
mean of data is the cluster center anditeration is continued till the
operation between iterations exceeds a threshold value. This
method is more time consuming and to overcome this problem.
Atkins proposed such a model for brain tumor segmentation. Here