Soft fuzzy rough set-based MR brain image segmentation

Fuzzy sets, rough sets are efficient tools to handle uncertainty and vagueness in the medical images and are widely used for medical image segmentation. Soft sets are a new mathematical approach to uncertainty and vagueness. In this paper, a hybrid segmentation algorithm based on soft sets namely soft fuzzy rough c-means is proposed to extract the white matter, gray matter and the cerebro spinal fluid from MR brain image with bias field correction. In this algorithm, soft fuzzy rough approximations are applied to obtain the rough regions of image. These approximations are free from defining thresholds, weight parameters and are less complex compared to the existing rough set based algorithms. Soft sets use similarity coefficients to find the similarity of the clusters formed in present and previous step. The proposed algorithm does not involve any negative region, hence all the pixels participate in clustering avoiding clustering mistakes. Also, the histogram based centroids choose the centroids close to the ground truth that in turn effect the definition of approximations, standardizing the clusters. The proposed algorithm evaluated through simulation, compared it with existing k-means, rough k-means, fuzzy c-means and other hybrid algorithms. The soft fuzzy rough c-means algorithm outperforms the considered algorithms in all analyzed scenarios even in extracting the tumor from the brain tissue.