2010 Second International conference on Computing, Communication and Networking Technologies
A ROBUST FUZZY CLUSTERING TECHNIQUE WITH SPATIAL NEIGHBORHOOD
INFORMATION FOR EFFECTIVE MEDICAL IMAGE SEGMENTATION
An Efficient Variants of Fuzzy Clustering Technique with Spatial Information
for Effective Noisy Medical Image Segmentation
S.Zulaikha Beevi
1
, M.Mohammed Sathik
2
, K.Senthamaraikannan
3
,J.H.Jaseema Yasmin
4
1
Assistant Professor, Department of IT, National College of Engineering, Tamilnadu, India.
2
Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, Sathakathullah Appa College, Tamilnadu, India.
3
Professor & Head, Department of Statistics, Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Tamilnadu, India.
4
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, National College of Engineering, Tamilnadu, Inida.
Abstract- Segmentation is an important step in many medical
imaging applications and a variety of image segmentation
techniques do exist. Of them, a group of segmentation algorithms
is based on the clustering concepts. In our research, we have
intended to devise efficient variants of Fuzzy C-Means (FCM)
clustering towards effective segmentation of medical images. The
enhanced variants of FCM clustering are to be devised in a way
to effectively segment noisy medical images. The medical images
generally are bound to contain noise while acquisition. So, the
algorithms devised for medical image segmentation must be
robust to noise for achieving desirable segmentation results. The
existing variants of FCM-based algorithms, segment images
without considering the spatial information, which makes it
sensitive to noise. We proposed the algorithm, which incorporate
spatial information into FCM, have shown considerable resilience
to noise, yet with increased noise levels in images, these
approaches have not performed exceptionally well. In the
proposed research, the input noisy medical images are employed
to a denoising algorithm with the help of effective denoising
algorithm prior to segmentation. Moreover, the proposed
approach will improve upon the existing variants of FCM-based
segmentation algorithms by integrating the spatial neighborhood
information present in the images for better segmentation. The
spatial neighborhood information of the images will be
determined using a factor that represents the spatial influence of
the neighboring pixels on the current pixel. The employed factor
works on the assumption that the membership degree of a pixel to
a cluster is greatly influenced by the membership of its
neighborhood pixels. Subsequently, the denoised images will be
segmented using the designed variants of FCM. The proposed
segmentation approach will be robust to noisy images even at
increased levels of noise, thereby enabling effective segmentation
of noisy medical images.
978-1-4244-6589-7/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE
Index Terms - clustering, fuzzy C-means, image segmentation,
membership function, variants.
I.I
NTRODUCTION
Data clustering is a common technique for statistical data
analysis, which is used in many fields, including machine
learning, data mining, pattern recognition, image analysis and
bioinformatics. Clustering is the classification of similar
objects into different groups, or more precisely, the
partitioning of a data set into subsets (clusters), so that the data
in each subset (ideally) share some common trait - often
proximity according to some defined distance measure.
Medical imaging techniques such as X - ray, computed
tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI),
positron emission tomography (PET), ultrasound (USG), etc.
are indispensable for the precise analysis of various medical
pathologies. Computer power and medical scanner data alone
are not enough. We need the art to extract the necessary
boundaries, surfaces, and segmented volumes these organs in
the spatial and temporal domains. This art of organ extraction
is segmentation. Image segmentation is essentially a process of
pixel classification, wherein the image pixels are segmented
into subsets by assigning the individual pixels to classes. These
segmented organs and their boundaries are very critical in the
quantification process for physicians and medical surgeons, in
any branch of medicine, which deals with imaging [1].
Recently, fuzzy techniques are often applied as complementary
to existing techniques and can contribute to the development
of better and more robust methods, as it has been illustrated in
numerous scientific branches. It seems to be proved that