Segmentation of Brain Tissues from MRI Images Using Multitask Fuzzy Clustering Algorithm

In recent years, brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) image segmentation has drawn considerable attention. MRI image segmentation result provides a basis for medical diagnosis. The segmentation result influences the clinical treatment directly. Nevertheless, MRI images have shortcomings such as noise and the inhomogeneity of grayscale. The performance of traditional segmentation algorithms still needs further improvement. In this paper, we propose a novel brain MRI image segmentation algorithm based on fuzzy C-means (FCM) clustering algorithm to improve the segmentation accuracy. First, we introduce multitask learning strategy into FCM to extract public information among different segmentation tasks. It combines the advantages of the two algorithms. The algorithm enables to utilize both public information among different tasks and individual information within tasks. Then, we design an adaptive task weight learning mechanism, and a weighted multitask fuzzy C-means (WMT-FCM) clustering algorithm is proposed. Under the adaptive task weight learning mechanism, each task obtains the optimal weight and achieves better clustering performance. Simulated MRI images from McConnell BrainWeb have been used to evaluate the proposed algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method provides more accurate and stable segmentation results than its competitors on the MRI images with various noise and intensity inhomogeneity.