Fuzzy C means integrated with spatial information and contrast enhancement for segmentation of MR brain images

This paper proposes a fully automated method for MR brain image segmentation into Gray Matter, White Matter and Cerebro-spinal Fluid. It is an extension of Fuzzy C Means Clustering Algorithm which overcomes its drawbacks, of sensitivity to noise and inhomogeneity. In the conventional FCM, the membership function is computed based on the Euclidean distance between the pixel and the cluster center. It does not take into consideration the spatial correlation among the neighboring pixels. This means that the membership values of adjacent pixels belonging to the same cluster may not have the same range of membership value due to the contamination of noise and hence misclassified. Hence, in the proposed method, the membership function is convolved with mean filter and thus the local spatial information is incorporated in the clustering process. The method further includes pixel re-labeling and contrast enhancement using non-linear mapping to improve the segmentation accuracy. The proposed method is applied to both simulated and real T1-weighted MR brain images from BrainWeb and IBSR database. Experiments show that there is an increase in segmentation accuracy of around 30% over the conventional methods and 6% over the state of the art methods.