Clustering Techniques for Brain Tumor Detection Ramish B. Kawadiwale 1 and Milind E. Rane 2 1 Vishwakarma Institute of Technology/Dept. of Electronics and Telecommunication, Pune, India Email: ramish.kawadiwale.vit@gmail.com 2 Vishwakarma Institute of Technology/Dept. of Electronics and Telecommunication, Pune, India Email: me_rane@yahoo.com Abstract— Brain tumor is a malformed growth of cells within brain which may be cancerous or non-cancerous. The term ‘malformed’ indicates the existence of tumor. The tumor may be benign or malignant and it needs medical support for further classification. Brain tumor must be detected, diagnosed and evaluated in earliest stage. The medical problems become grave if tumor is detected at the later stage. Out of various technologies available for diagnosis of brain tumor, MRI is the preferred technology which enables the diagnosis and evaluation of brain tumor. The current work presents various clustering techniques that are employed to detect brain tumor. The classification involves classification of images into normal and malformed (if detected the tumor). The algorithm deals with steps such as preprocessing, segmentation, feature extraction and classification of MR brain images. Finally, the confirmatory step is specifying the tumor area by technique called region of interest. Index Terms— MR Brain images, Clustering, K-means Clustering, Hierarchical, Gray matter (GM), Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), White matter (WM). I. INTRODUCTION BRAIN, the central processing unit of human body, is a soft, delicate and spongy mass of tissues. It is a steady place for signals to enter and being processed. A tumor is a detrimental volume formed by abnormal growth of cells which looks like a swelling. A group of malformed cells that grows inside of the brain or around the brain is called brain tumor. Brain tumors are the tenth most common cause of cancer death. Brain tumors can be classified into two general classes depending on the origin of tumors, their pattern of growth and malignancy. Tumors that are developed from cells within the brain itself are primary brain tumors. Whereas, a secondary or metastatic brain tumors are developed when cancer cells from cancer in another part of the body spread to the brain [1]. According to research statistics, the number of brain tumors patients and number of deaths due to it has increased perhaps as much as 300 over past three decades. The most common primary cancers that spread to the brain are lung, breast, unknown primary melanoma and colon cancer. The structure and function of the brain can be studied noninvasively by doctors and researchers using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) strongly depends on computer technology to generate or display digital images. MRI systems are very important in medical image analysis. The MR image shows the clear peculiarity between the tissues, bones and fluid, so it makes easy to distinguish the tumor part from the image [5]. In medical imaging, an image is captured, digitized and processed for doing segmentation and for extracting important information. In order to haul out the tumor region efficiently the MRI image should be DOI: 02.ITC.2014.5.49 © Association of Computer Electronics and Electrical Engineers, 2014 Proc. of Int. Conf. on Recent Trends in Information, Telecommunication and Computing, ITC