Iterative spatial fuzzy clustering for 3D brain magnetic resonance image supervoxel segmentation

Abstract Background Although supervoxel segmentation methods have been employed for brain Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) processing and analysis, due to the specific features of the brain, including complex-shaped internal structures and partial volume effect, their performance remains unsatisfactory. New methods To address these issues, this paper presents a novel iterative spatial fuzzy clustering (ISFC) algorithm to generate 3D supervoxels for brain MRI volume based on prior knowledge. This work makes use of the common topology among the human brains to obtain a set of seed templates from a population-based brain template MRI image. After selecting the number of supervoxels, the corresponding seed template is projected onto the considered individual brain for generating reliable seeds. Then, to deal with the influence of partial volume effect, an efficient iterative spatial fuzzy clustering algorithm is proposed to allocate voxels to the seeds and to generate the supervoxels for the overall brain MRI volume. Results The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated on two widely used public brain MRI datasets and compared with three other up-to-date methods. Conclusions The proposed algorithm can be utilized for several brain MRI processing and analysis, including tissue segmentation, tumor detection and segmentation, functional parcellation and registration.