A novel approach for adaptive unsupervised segmentation of MRI brain images

Abstract

An integrated method using the adaptive segmentation of brain tissues in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) images is proposed in this paper. Firstly, we give a template of brain to remove the extra-cranial tissues. Subsequently, watershed algorithm is applied to brain tissues as an initial segmenting method. Normally, result of classical watershed algorithm on gray-scale textured images such as tissue images is over-segmentation. The following procedure is a merging process for the over-segmentation regions using fuzzy clustering algorithm (Fuzzy C-Means). But there are still some regions which are not partitioned completely, particularly in the transitional regions between gray matter and white matter. So we proposed a rule-based re-segmentation processing approach to partition these regions. This integrated scheme yields a robust and precise segmentation. The efficacy of the proposed algorithm is validated using extensive experiments. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.