MRI SEGMENTATION BY FUZZY CLUSTERING METHOD BASED ON PRIOR KNOWLEDGE

Image segmentation is often required as a fundamental stage in medical image processing, particularly during the clinical analysis of magnetic resonance (MR) brain images. Fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering algorithm is one of the best known and widely used segmentation methods, but this algorithm has some problem for segmenting simulated MRI images to high number of clusters with different noise levels and real images because of spatial complexities. Anatomical segmentation usually requires information derived from the manual segmentations done by experts, prior knowledge can be useful to modify image segmentation methods. In this paper, we propose some methods to modify FCM algorithm using expert manual segmentation as prior knowledge. We developed combination of FCM algorithm and prior knowledge in three ways, in order to improve segmentation of brain MR images with high noise level and spatial complexity. In real images, we had a considerable improvement in similarity index of three classes (white matter,...