A modified FCM algorithm for fast segmentation of brain MR images

Automated brain MR image segmentation is a challenging problem and received significant attention lately. Several improvements have been made to the standard fuzzy c-means (FCM) algorithm, in order to reduce its sensitivity to Gaussian, impulse, and intensity non-uniformity noises. In this paper we present a modified FCM algorithm, which aims accurate segmentation in case of mixed noises, and performs at a high processing speed. The proposed method extracts a scalar feature value from the neighborhood of each pixel, using a filtering technique that deals with both spatial and gray level distances. These features are classified afterwards using the histogram-based approach of the enhanced FCM classifier. The experiments using synthetic phantoms and real MR images show, that the proposed method provides better results compared to other reported FCM-based techniques.