MRI brain segmentation in combination of clustering methods with Markov random field

Medical image segmentation is a preliminary stage of inclusion in identification tools. The correct segmentation of brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) images is crucial for an accurate detection of the disease diagnosis. Due to in‐homogeneity, low distinction and noise the segmentation of the brain MRI images is treated as the most challenging task. In this article, we proposed hybrid segmentation, by combining the clustering methods with Hidden Markov Random Field (HMRF) technique. This aims to decrease the computational load and improves the runtime of segmentation method, as MRF methodology is used in post‐processing the images. Its evaluation has performed on real imaging data, resulting in the classification of brain tissues with dice similarity metric. These results indicate the improvement in performance of the proposed method with various noise levels, compared with existing algorithms. In implementation, selection of clustering method provides better results in the segmentation of MRI brain images.     

Fuzzy entropy‐based MR brain image segmentation using modified particle swarm optimization

This article presents an image segmentation technique based on fuzzy entropy, which is applied to magnetic resonance (MR) brain images in order to detect brain tumors. The proposed method performs image segmentation based on adaptive thresholding of the input MR images. The image is classified into two membership functions (MFs) of the fuzzy region: Z‐function and S‐function. The optimal parameters of these fuzzy MFs are obtained using modified particle swarm optimization (MPSO) algorithm. The objective function for obtaining the optimal fuzzy MF parameters is considered to be the maximum fuzzy entropy. Through a number of examples, The performance is compared with existing entropy based object segmentation approaches and the superiority of the proposed method is demonstrated. The experimental results are compared with the exhaustive search method and Otsu's segmentation technique. The result shows the proposed fuzzy entropy‐based segmentation method optimized using MPSO achieves maximum entropy with proper segmentation of infected areas and with minimum computational time. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 23, 281–288, 2013     

Automatic segmentation of cerebral hemispheres in MR human head scans

Automatic segmentation of cerebral hemispheres in magnetic resonance (MR) brain images help to quantify the brain asymmetry and correct several MR brain deformities. The detection of mid‐sagittal plane (MSP) in human brain image is necessary to segment the hemispheres for both operator‐based and automated brain image asymmetric analysis. In this article, a computationally simple and accurate technique to detect MSP in MRI human head scans using curve fitting is developed. The left and right hemispheres are segmented based on the detected MSP. The accuracy of the MSP is evaluated by comparing the segmented left and right hemispheres against the manually segmented ones. Experimental results using 78 volumes of T1, T2 and PD‐weighted MRI brain images show that the proposed method has accurately segmented the cerebral hemispheres based on the detected MSP in axial and coronal orientations of normal and pathological brain images.     

Hierarchical fuzzy segmentation of brain MR images

In brain magnetic resonance (MR) images, image segmentation and 3D visualization are very useful tools for the diagnosis of abnormalities. Segmentation of white matter (WM), gray matter (GM), and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is the basic process for 3D visualization of brain MR images. Of the many algorithms, the fuzzy c‐means (FCM) technique has been widely used for segmentation of brain MR images. However, the FCM technique does not yield sufficient results under radio frequency (RF) nonuniformity. We propose a hierarchical FCM (HFCM), which provides good segmentation results under RF nonuniformity and does not require any parameter setting. We also generate Talairach templates of the brain that are deformed to 3D brain MR images. Using the deformed templates, only the cerebrum region is extracted from the 3D brain MR images. Then, the proposed HFCM partitions the cerebrum region into WM, GM, and CSF. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol 13, 115–125, 2003; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ima.10035     

Multiatlas‐based segmentation of female pelvic organs: Application for computer‐aided diagnosis of cervical cancer

Atlas‐based segmentation is a high level segmentation technique which has become a standard paradigm for exploiting prior knowledge in image segmentation. Recent multiatlas‐based methods have provided greatly accurate segmentations of different parts of the human body by propagating manual delineations from multiple atlases in a data set to a query subject and fusing them. The female pelvic region is known to be of high variability which makes the segmentation task difficult. We propose, here, an approach for the segmentation of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) called multiatlas‐based segmentation using online machine learning (OML). The proposed approach allows separating regions which may be affected by cervical cancer in a female pelvic MRI. The suggested approach is based on an online learning method for the construction of the dataset of atlases. The experiments demonstrate the higher accuracy of the suggested approach compared to a segmentation technique based on a fixed dataset of atlases and single‐atlas‐based segmentation technique.     

MRI brain image classification—a hybrid approach

The present article proposes a novel computer‐aided diagnosis (CAD) technique for the classification of the magnetic resonance brain images. The current method adopt color converted hybrid clustering segmentation algorithm with hybrid feature selection approach based on IGSFFS (Information gain and Sequential Forward Floating Search) and Multi‐Class Support Vector Machine (MC‐SVM) classifier technique to segregate the magnetic resonance brain images into three categories namely normal, benign and malignant. The proposed hybrid evolutionary segmentation algorithm which is the combination of WFF(weighted firefly) and K‐means algorithm called WFF‐K‐means and modified cuckoo search (MCS) and K‐means algorithm called MCS‐K‐means, which can find better cluster partition in brain tumor datasets and also overcome local optima problems in K‐means clustering algorithm. The experimental results show that the performance of the proposed algorithm is better than other algorithms such as PSO‐K‐means, color converted K‐means, FCM and other traditional approaches. The multiple feature set comprises color, texture and shape features derived from the segmented image. These features are then fed into a MC‐SVM classifier with hybrid feature selection algorithm, trained with data labeled by experts, enabling the detection of brain images at high accuracy levels. The performance of the method is evaluated using classification accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. The proposed method provides highest classification accuracy of greater than 98% with high sensitivity and specificity rates of greater than 95% for the proposed diagnostic model and this shows the promise of the approach. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 25, 226–244, 2015     

FPGA implementation of particle swarm optimization based on new fitness function for MRI images segmentation

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is considered as a key part in therapeutic procedures because it clearly defines the aim. It also avoids sensitive organs and it determines the desired paths. This phenomenon requires image processing operations such as segmentation to locate the tumor. Medical image segmentation is still an important topic in the field of brain tumor. In the present article, we propose a Hardware Architecture of segmentation based on a Modified Particle Swarm Optimization (HAMPSO) algorithm for MRI images segmentation. To achieve this, we use the Xilinx System Generator (XSG) to be implemented on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). This architecture is based on a new variant of objective function. These performances of the proposed method are proved using a set of MRI images and were compared to the Hardware Architecture of segmentation based on Particle Swarm Optimization (HAPSO) in terms of either device utilization, execution time, qualitatively or quantitatively results.     

Fully automatic method for segmentation of brain tumor from multimodal magnetic resonance images using wavelet transformation and clustering technique

Fully automatic brain tumor segmentation is one of the critical tasks in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images. This proposed work is aimed to develop an automatic method for brain tumor segmentation process by wavelet transformation and clustering technique. The proposed method using discrete wavelet transform (DWT) for pre‐ and post‐processing, fuzzy c‐means (FCM) for brain tissues segmentation. Initially, MRI images are preprocessed by DWT to sharpen the images and enhance the tumor region. It assists to quicken the FCM clustering technique and classified into four major classes: gray matter (GM), white matter (WM), cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), and background (BG). Then check the abnormality detection using Fuzzy symmetric measure for GM, WM, and CSF classes. Finally, DWT method is applied in segmented abnormal region of images respectively and extracts the tumor portion. The proposed method used 30 multimodal MRI training datasets from BraTS2012 database. Several quantitative measures were calculated and compared with the existing. The proposed method yielded the mean value of similarity index as 0.73 for complete tumor, 0.53 for core tumor, and 0.35 for enhancing tumor. The proposed method gives better results than the existing challenging methods over the publicly available training dataset from MICCAI multimodal brain tumor segmentation challenge and a minimum processing time for tumor segmentation. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 26, 305–314, 2016     

Online variational learning of finite inverted Beta-Liouville mixture model for biomedical analysis

Image segmentation is widely applied for biomedical image analysis. However, segmentation of medical images is challenging due to many image modalities, such as, CT, X-ray, MRI, microscopy among others. An additional challenge to this is the high variability, inconsistent regions with missing edges, absence of texture contrast, and high noise in the background of biomedical images. Thus, many segmentation approaches have been investigated to address these issues and to transform medical images into meaningful information. During the past decade, finite mixture models have been revealed to be one of the most flexible and popular approaches in data clustering. In this article, we propose a statistical framework for online variational learning of finite inverted Beta-Liouville mixture model for clustering medical images. The online variational learning framework is used to estimate the parameters and the number of mixture components simultaneously, thus decreasing the computational complexity of the model. To this end, we evaluated our proposed algorithm on five different biomedical image data sets including optic disc detection and localization in diabetic retinopathy, digital imaging in melanoma lesion detection and segmentation, brain tumor detection, colon cancer detection and computer aid detection (CAD) of Malaria. Furthermore, we compared the proposed algorithm with three other popular algorithms. In our results, we analyze that the proposed online variational learning of finite IBL mixture model algorithm performs accurately on multiple modalities of medical images. It detects the disease patterns with high confidence. Computational and statistical approaches like the one presented in this article hold a significant impact on medical image analysis and interpretation in both clinical applications and scientific research. We believe that the proposed algorithm has the capacity to address multi modal biomedical image data sets and can be further applied by researchers to analyze correct disease patterns.     

基于小波域多分辨率MRF的声呐图像目标分割

声呐图像受噪声影响严重,分辨率低,传统算法对其目标分割效果较差,为此,提出了小波域多分辨率MRF模型的声呐图像分割算法。小波域多分辨率分析有利于提取声呐图像弱特征信息;每一分辨率中的观测特征采用高斯混合模型建模,尺度内同标记的观测特征用高斯模型建模,用各向同性的双点多级逻辑(Multi-Level Logistic,MLL)模型建模每一尺度的标记场;最后,用迭代条件模式(Iterated Conditional Mode,ICM)实现多分辨率马尔可夫随机场(Multi-Resolution Markov Random Field,MRA-MRF)中能量函数的最优解,获取标记场,完成声呐图像分割。从视觉效果和定量分析两方面验证。对比实验的结果表明,该文算法能有效地提取声呐图像的弱目标信息,较好地将目标区域和背景区域分割出来,具有较高的分割精度和鲁棒性。     

Robust brain MRI denoising and segmentation using enhanced non‐local means algorithm

Image denoising is an integral component of many practical medical systems. Non‐local means (NLM) is an effective method for image denoising which exploits the inherent structural redundancy present in images. Improved adaptive non‐local means (IANLM) is an improved variant of classical NLM based on a robust threshold criterion. In this paper, we have proposed an enhanced non‐local means (ENLM) algorithm, for application to brain MRI, by introducing several extensions to the IANLM algorithm. First, a Rician bias correction method is applied for adapting the IANLM algorithm to Rician noise in MR images. Second, a selective median filtering procedure based on fuzzy c‐means algorithm is proposed as a postprocessing step, in order to further improve the quality of IANLM‐filtered image. Third, different parameters of the proposed ENLM algorithm are optimized for application to brain MR images. Different variants of the proposed algorithm have been presented in order to investigate the influence of the proposed modifications. The proposed variants have been validated on both T1‐weighted (T1‐w) and T2‐weighted (T2‐w) simulated and real brain MRI. Compared with other denoising methods, superior quantitative and qualitative denoising results have been obtained for the proposed algorithm. Additionally, the proposed algorithm has been applied to T2‐weighted brain MRI with multiple sclerosis lesion to show its superior capability of preserving pathologically significant information. Finally, impact of the proposed algorithm has been tested on segmentation of brain MRI. Quantitative and qualitative segmentation results verify that the proposed algorithm based segmentation is better compared with segmentation produced by other contemporary techniques.     

A new images segmentation method based on modified particle swarm optimization algorithm

The partitioning of an image into several constituent components is called image segmentation. Many approaches have been developed; one of them is the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, which is widely used. PSO algorithm is one of the most recent stochastic optimization strategies. In this article, a new efficient technique for the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain images segmentation thematic based on PSO is proposed. The proposed algorithm presents an improved variant of PSO, which is particularly designed for optimal segmentation and it is called modified particle swarm optimization. The fitness function is used to evaluate all the particle swarm in order to arrange them in a descending order. The algorithm is evaluated by performance measures such as run time execution and the quality of the image after segmentation. The performance of the segmentation process is demonstrated by using a defined set of benchmark images and compared against conventional PSO, genetic algorithm, and PSO with Mahalanobis distance based segmentation methods. Then we applied our method on MRI brain image to determinate normal and pathological tissues. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 23, 265–271, 2013     

A deep learning model integrating convolution neural network and multiple kernel K means clustering for segmenting brain tumor in magnetic resonance images

In medical imaging, segmenting brain tumor becomes a vital task, and it provides a way for early diagnosis and treatment. Manual segmentation of brain tumor in magnetic resonance (MR) images is a time‐consuming and challenging task. Hence, there is a need for a computer‐aided brain tumor segmentation approach. Using deep learning algorithms, a robust brain tumor segmentation approach is implemented by integrating convolution neural network (CNN) and multiple kernel K means clustering (MKKMC). In this proposed CNN‐MKKMC approach, classification of MR images into normal and abnormal is performed by CNN algorithm. At next, MKKMC algorithm is employed to segment the brain tumor from the abnormal brain image. The proposed CNN‐MKKMC algorithm is evaluated both visually and objectively in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity with the existing segmentation methods. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CNN‐MKKMC approach yields better accuracy in segmenting brain tumor with less time cost.     

Improved fuzzy entropy clustering algorithm for MRI brain image segmentation

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain image segmentation is essential at preliminary stage in the neuroscience research and computer‐aided diagnosis. However, presence of noise and intensity inhomogeneity in MRI brain images leads to improper segmentation. The fuzzy entropy clustering (FEC) is often used to deal with noisy data. One major disadvantage of the FEC algorithm is that it does not consider the local spatial information. In this article, we have proposed an improved fuzzy entropy clustering (IFEC) algorithm by introducing a new fuzzy factor, which incorporates both local spatial and gray‐level information. The IFEC algorithm is insensitive to noise, preserves the image detail during clustering, and is free of parameter selection. The efficacy of IFEC algorithm is demonstrated by comparing it quantitatively with the state‐of‐the‐art segmentation approaches in terms of similarity index on publically available real and simulated MRI brain images.     

Hybrid GrabCut Hidden Markov Model for Segmentation

Diagnosing data or object detection in medical images is one of the important parts of image segmentation especially those data which is less effective to identify in MRI such as low-grade tumors or cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) leaks in the brain. The aim of the study is to address the problems associated with detecting the low-grade tumor and CSF in brain is difficult in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images and another problem also relates to efficiency and less execution time for segmentation of medical images. For tumor and CSF segmentation using trained light field database (LFD) datasets of MRI images. This research proposed the new framework of the hybrid k-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN) model that is a combination of hybridization of Graph Cut and Support Vector Machine (GCSVM) and Hidden Markov Model of k-Mean Clustering Algorithm (HMMkC). There are four different methods are used in this research namely (1) SVM, (2) GrabCut segmentation, (3) HMM, and (4) k-mean clustering algorithm. In this framework, on the one hand, phase one is to perform the classification of SVM and Graph Cut algorithm to create the maximum margin distance. This research use GrabCut segmentation method which is the application of the graph cut algorithm and extract the data with the help of scale-invariant features transform. On the other hand, in phase two, segment the low-grade tumors and CSF using a method adapted for HMkC and extract the information of tumor or CSF fluid by GCHMkC including iterative conditional maximizing mode (ICMM) with identifying the range of distant. Comparative evaluation is also performing by the comparison of existing techniques in this research. In conclusion, our proposed model gives better results than existing. This proposed model helps to common man and doctor that can identify their condition of brain easily. In future, this will model will use for other brain related diseases.     

A fast and efficient computer aided diagnostic system to detect tumor from brain magnetic resonance imaging

In this work, a simple and efficient CAD (computer‐aided diagnostic) system is proposed for tumor detection from brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Poor contrast MR images are preprocessed by using morphological operations and DSR (dynamic stochastic resonance) technique. The appropriate segmentation of MR images plays an important role in yielding the correct detection of tumor. On examination of three views of brain MRI, it was visible that the region of interest (ROI) lies in the middle and its size ranges from 240 × 240 mm² to 280 × 280 mm². The proposed system makes effective use of this information and identifies four blocks from the desired ROI through block‐based segmentation. Texture and shape features are extracted for each block of all MRIs in the training set. The range of these feature values defines the threshold to distinguish tumorous and nontumorous MRIs. Features of each block of an MRI view are checked against the threshold. For a particular feature, if a block is found tumorous in a view, then the other views are also checked for the presence of tumor. If corresponding blocks in all the views are found to be tumorous, then the MRI is classified as tumorous. This selective block processing technique improves computational efficiency of the system. The proposed technique is well adaptive and fast, and it is compared with well‐known existing techniques, like k‐means, fuzzy c‐means, etc. The performance analysis based on accuracy and precision parameters emphasizes the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed work.     

A novel automated magnetic resonance image segmentation approach based on elliptical gamma mixture model for breast lumps detection

This article introduces a novel semisupervised automated segmentation approach for breast magnetic resonance (MR) image on multicore CPU-GPU systems. The basic idea of the proposed method is clustering-based semisupervised classifier devised by elliptical gamma mixture model (EGMM). Parameters of EGMM are identified by the iterative log-expectation maximization (EM) algorithm. The suggested classifier labels the groups of voxels in an input image first and then classifies the image slices using the EGMM. Two different implementations of the proposed algorithm have been developed based on two different types of high-performance computing architectures such as graphics processing units (GPUs) and multicore processors. To realize the real-time segmentation performance of our algorithm with two distinctive architecture, we have tested a set of breast MR images collected from MedPix. Comparison between two architectures in terms of segmentation performance and computational cost is assessed by the analysis of simulation and experimental results.     

Fetal brain extraction from magnetic resonance image (MRI) of human fetus

Study of a fetus is a rapidly growing field of research and it requires fetal brain segmentation. Automatic segmentation of the fetal brain from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is challenging, due to the highly variable size and shape of the developing brain, possible brain structure abnormalities, movement of the fetus and a poor resolution of fetal MRI scans. This is in contrast to adult brain segmentation, where the brain structure is stable and several established methods exist. This paper presents a fully automatic segmentation method to segment the fetal brain portion from MRI. The segmentation pipeline developed in this study includes contrast enhancement, region growing and hole filling. Twenty-five volumes of retrospective fetal MRI are used in this work. Experimental results show that this method can successfully segment the fetal brain from magnetic resonance images which are comparable to that of a semi-automatic method.     

Dual‐pathway DenseNets with fully lateral connections for multimodal brain tumor segmentation

Multimodal medical image data provide different structured and functional information, which helps segment brain tumor and gets a reliable and accurate diagnosis. Segmenting brain tumors in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a challenging task because brain tumors can be at any location with changeable shape and size. Existing deep neural networks for brain tumor segmentation use few connections to fuse multilevel information. To make use of multilevel information from multimodal MRIs, we propose dual‐pathway DenseNets with fully lateral connections (DP‐DenseNets), a three‐dimensional (3D) fully convolutional neural network that uses dense connectivity to construct dual‐pathway architecture to multimodal brain tumor segmentation problem. Each two similar imaging modalities have a pathway, for one thing, the bottom‐up pathway with dense connectivity is developed for extracting features; another, the top‐down pathway concatenates the features of the bottom‐up pathway in all layers. Dual pathways with different loss functions and fully lateral connectivity from the bottom‐up pathway to the top‐down pathway provide an abundant combination of different levels of features. Comparing to these fusion schemes such as input‐level fusion and later‐level fusion, this architecture leverages semantics from low to high levels, which is provided by fully lateral connectivity. Our model is evaluated on the dataset from Brain Tumor Segmentation Challenge 2017 (BRATS 2017), and the experiments show that our method achieves better performance than other 3D networks.     

A comprehensive review: Segmentation of MRI images—brain tumor

Segmentation of tumors in human brain aims to classify different abnormal tissues (necrotic core, edema, active cells) from normal tissues (cerebrospinal fluid, gray matter, white matter) of the brain. In existence, detection of abnormal tissues is easy for studying brain tumor, but reproducibility, characterization of abnormalities and accuracy are complicated in the process of segmentation. The magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)‐based segmentation of tumors in brain images is more enhancing and attracting in current years of research studies. It is due to non‐invasive examination and good contrast prone to soft tissues of images obtained from MRI modality. Medical approval of different segmentation techniques depends on the benchmark and simplicity of the method. This article incorporates both fully‐automatic and semi‐automatic methods for segmentation. The outlook study of this article is to provide the summary of most significant segmentation methods of tumors in brain using MRI. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 26, 295–304, 2016