Breast Lesion Segmentation in DCE-MRI using Multi-Objective Clustering with NSGA-II

Abstract

Breast cancer causes the highest death among all types of cancers in women. Early detection and diagnosis leading to early treatment can save the life. The computer-assisted methodologies for breast dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) segmentation can help the radiologists/doctors in the diagnosis of the disease as well as further treatment planning. In this article, we propose a breast DCE-MRI segmentation method using a hard-clustering technique with a Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-II). The well-known cluster validity metrics namely DB-index and Dunn-index are utilized as objective functions in NSGA-II algorithm. The noise and intensity inhomogeneities in MRI are removed from MRI in the preprocessing step as these artifacts affect the segmentation process. After segmentation, the lesions are separated and finally, localized in the MRI. The devised method is applied to segment 10 Sagittal T2-Weighted fat-suppressed DCE-MRI of the breast. A comparative study has been conducted with the K-means algorithm and the devised method outperforms K-means both quantitatively and qualitatively.