A spatial fuzzy C-means algorithm for segmentation of brain MRI images

Brain and its structure are extremely complex with deep levels of details. Applying image processing methods of brain image can be very useful in many practical domains. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is widely used imaging technique and has particular advantage by possessing the capability of providing highly detailed images of brain soft tissues than any other imaging techniques. The real challenge at hand for researchers is to perform precise segmentation while overcoming the effects of noise and other imaging artifacts like intensity in homogeneity introduced in medical images during image acquisition process. In this research work, a directional weighted optimized Fuzzy C-Means (dwsFCM) method has been proposed for segmentation of brain MR images. This method works by incorporating the spatial information of the pixels of the images and assigning the directional weights to the neighborhood. In order to validate the proposed segmentation framework, a comprehensive set of experiments have been performed on publically available standard simulated as well as real datasets. The experimental results showed 95% of accuracy and the performance of the proposed segmentation framework is much better and the framework suppress the sufficient amount of noise especially rician noise and reproduce good segmentation by overcoming the effect of intensity in homogeneity.