Fuzzy C-mean based brain MRI segmentation algorithms

Brain image segmentation is one of the most important parts of clinical diagnostic tools. Fuzzy C-mean (FCM) is one of the most popular clustering based segmentation methods. In this paper, a review of the FCM based segmentation algorithms for brain MRI images is presented. The review covers algorithms for FCM based segmentation algorithms, their comparative evaluations based on reported results and the result of experiments for neighborhood based extensions for FCM.     

A Modified Fuzzy C-Means Algorithm for Brain MR Image Segmentation and Bias Field Correction

In quantitative brain image analysis, accurate brain tissue segmentation from brain magnetic resonance image (MRI) is a critical step. It is considered to be the most important and difficult issue in the field of medical image processing. The quality of MR images is influenced by partial volume effect, noise, and intensity inhomogeneity, which render the segmentation task extremely challenging. We present a novel fuzzy c-means algorithm (RCLFCM) for segmentation and bias field correction of brain MR images. We employ a new gray-difference coefficient and design a new impact factor to measure the effect of neighbor pixels, so that the robustness of anti-noise can be enhanced. Moreover, we redefine the objective function of FCM (fuzzy c-means) by adding the bias field estimation model to overcome the intensity inhomogeneity in the image and segment the brain MR images simultaneously. We also construct a new spatial function by combining pixel gray value dissimilarity with its membership, and make full use of the space information between pixels to update the membership. Compared with other state-of-the-art approaches by using similarity accuracy on synthetic MR images with different levels of noise and intensity inhomogeneity, the proposed algorithm generates the results with high accuracy and robustness to noise.     

Gaussian mixture model based segmentation methods for brain MRI images

Image segmentation is at a preliminary stage of inclusion in diagnosis tools and the accurate segmentation of brain MRI images is crucial for a correct diagnosis by these tools. Due to in-homogeneity, low contrast, noise and inequality of content with semantic; brain MRI image segmentation is a challenging job. A review of the Gaussian Mixture Model based segmentation algorithms for brain MRI images is presented. The review covers algorithms for segmentation algorithms and their comparative evaluations based on reported results.     

基于模糊聚类的脑磁共振图像分割算法综述

磁共振成像（Magnetic resonance imaging, MRI） 技术以其非介入、无损伤以及不受目标运动影响等特点,已成为临床诊断的重要辅助手段。精确的脑MR图像分割对生物医学研究和临床应用具有重要的指导意义。在实际应用中,脑MR图像中存在的噪声、灰度不均匀性、部分容积效应和低对比度等缺陷,都给脑MR图像的 精确分割带来了巨大困难和挑战。本文基于模糊聚类模型的脑MR图像分割问题,从聚类类别数的确定、模型初始化、克服噪声、估计偏移场、克服部分容积效应、数据不确定性描述以及模型扩展7个方面深入阐述了国内外发展现状、应对技巧及改进策略,并分析存在的不足 ,指出进一步的研究方向。     

时间序列脑功能成象中的图象配准

脑功能成角是研究脑科学和生命科学的重要工具,在对脑功能图象进行统计分析时,有必要对时间序列脑功能成象中的图象进行配准,研究采用修正的Ｇａｕｓｓ－Ｎｅｗｔｏｎ最优化方法,通过计算配准图象之间残差平方和的极值,实现了时间序列脑功能图象的高精度配准。     

局部区域拟合的快速水平集图像分割方法

目的 由于灰度不均匀图像在不同目标区域的灰度分布存在严重的重叠,对其进行分割仍然是一个难题;同时,图像中的噪声严重降低了图像分割的准确性。因此,传统水平集方法无法鲁棒、精确、快速地对具有灰度不均匀性和噪声的图像进行分割。针对这一问题,提出一种基于局部区域信息的快速水平集图像分割方法。方法 灰度不均匀图像通常被描述为一个分段常数图像乘以一个缓慢变化的偏移场。首先,通过一个经过微调的多尺度均值滤波器来估计图像的偏移场,并对图像进行预处理以减轻图像的不均匀性;然后,利用基于偏移场校正的方法和基于局部区域信息拟合的方法分别构建能量项,并利用演化曲线轮廓内外图像灰度分布的重叠程度,构建权重函数自适应调整两个能量项之间的权重;最后,引入全方差规则项对水平集进行约束,增强了数值计算的稳定性和对噪声的鲁棒性,并通过加性算子分裂策略实现水平集快速演化。结果 在具有不同灰度不均匀性和噪声图像上的分割结果表明,所提方法不但对初始轮廓的位置、灰度不均匀性和各种噪声具有较强的鲁棒性,而且具有高达94.5%的分割精度和较高的分割效率,与传统水平集方法相比分割精度至少提高了20.6%,分割效率是LIC（local intensity clustering）模型的9倍;结论 本文提出一种基于局部区域信息的快速水平集图像分割方法。实验结果表明,与传统水平集方法相比具有较高的分割精度和分割效率,可以很好地应用于具有灰度不均匀和噪声的医学、红外和自然图像等的分割。     

MRI脑肿瘤图像分割研究进展及挑战

脑肿瘤分割是医学图像处理中的一项重要内容,其目的是辅助医生做出准确的诊断和治疗,在临床脑部医学领域具有重要的实用价值。核磁共振成像（MRI）是临床医生研究脑部组织结构的主要影像学工具,为了使更多研究者对MRI脑肿瘤图像分割理论及其发展进行探索,本文对该领域研究现状进行综述。首先总结了用于MRI脑肿瘤图像分割的方法,并对现有方法进行了分类,即分为监督分割和非监督分割;然后重点综述了基于深度学习的脑肿瘤分割方法,在研究其关键技术基础上归纳了优化策略;最后介绍了脑肿瘤分割（BraTS）挑战,并结合挑战中所用方法展望了脑肿瘤分割领域未来的发展趋势。MRI脑肿瘤图像分割领域的研究已经取得了一些显著进展,尤其是深度学习的发展为该领域的研究提供了新的思路。但由于脑肿瘤在大小、形状和位置方面的高度变化,以及脑肿瘤图像数据有限且类别不平衡等问题,使得脑肿瘤图像分割仍是一个极具挑战的课题。由于分割过程缺乏可解释性和透明性,如何将全自动分割方法应用于临床试验,还需要进行深入研究。     

基于形态学多尺度修正的脑肿瘤分割

针对脑部核磁共振成像(MRI)图像中因噪声、肿瘤内部灰度不均匀、模糊及边界不连续等造成肿瘤难以准确分割的问题,提出了一种基于形态学多尺度修正的控制标记符分水岭分割方法。该方法在形态学梯度图像基础上,根据不同像素点所在特定邻域内的梯度值自适应确定结构元素的大小;然后,对图像进行形态学多尺度修正,保证修正过程中目标轮廓不发生较大偏移;最后,采用控制标记符的分水岭变换对图像进行分割。实验结果表明,该方法可对脑肿瘤进行较精确的分割。     

MRI脑肿瘤图像分割的深度学习方法综述

磁共振成像（MRI）作为一种典型的非侵入式成像技术，可产生高质量的无损伤和无颅骨伪影的脑影像，为脑肿瘤的诊断和治疗提供更为全面的信息，是脑肿瘤诊疗的主要技术手段。MRI脑肿瘤自动分割利用计算机技术从多模态脑影像中自动将肿瘤区（坏死区、水肿区、非增强肿瘤区和增强肿瘤区）和正常组织区进行分割和标注，对于辅助脑肿瘤的诊疗具有重要作用。本文对MRI脑肿瘤图像分割的深度学习方法进行了总结与分析，给出了各类方法的基本思想、网络架构形式、代表性改进方案以及优缺点总结等，并给出了部分典型方法在BraTS（multimodal brain tumor segmentation）数据集上的性能表现与分析结果。通过对该领域研究方法进行综述，对现有基于深度学习的MRI脑肿瘤分割研究方法进行了梳理，作为新的发展方向，MRI脑肿瘤图像分割的深度学习方法较传统方法已取得明显的性能提升，已成为领域主流方法并持续展现出良好的发展前景，有助于进一步推动MRI脑肿瘤分割在临床诊疗上的应用。     

A framework with modified fast FCM for brain MR images segmentation

Intensity inhomogeneity, noise and partial volume (PV) effect render a challenging task for segmentation of brain magnetic resonance (MR) images. Most of the current MR image segmentation methods focus on only one or two of the effects listed above. In this paper, a framework with modified fast fuzzy c-means for brain MR images segmentation is proposed to take all these effects into account simultaneously and improve the accuracy of image segmentations. Firstly, we propose a new automated method to determine the initial values of the centroids. Secondly, an adaptive method to incorporate the local spatial continuity is proposed to overcome the noise effectively and prevent the edge from blurring. The intensity inhomogeneity is estimated by a linear combination of a set of basis functions. Meanwhile, a regularization term is added to reduce the iteration steps and accelerate the algorithm. The weights of the regularization terms are all automatically computed to avoid the manually tuned parameter. Synthetic and real MR images are used to test the proposed framework. Improved performance of the proposed algorithm is observed where the intensity inhomogeneity, noise and PV effect are commonly encountered. The experimental results show that the proposed method has stronger anti-noise property and higher segmentation precision than other reported FCM-based techniques.     

Robust spatially constrained fuzzy c-means algorithm for brain MR image segmentation

Objective

Accurate brain tissue segmentation from magnetic resonance (MR) images is an essential step in quantitative brain image analysis, and hence has attracted extensive research attention. However, due to the existence of noise and intensity inhomogeneity in brain MR images, many segmentation algorithms suffer from limited robustness to outliers, over-smoothness for segmentations and limited segmentation accuracy for image details. To further improve the accuracy for brain MR image segmentation, a robust spatially constrained fuzzy c-means (RSCFCM) algorithm is proposed in this paper.

Method

Firstly, a novel spatial factor is proposed to overcome the impact of noise in the images. By incorporating the spatial information amongst neighborhood pixels, the proposed spatial factor is constructed based on the posterior probabilities and prior probabilities, and takes the spatial direction into account. It plays a role as linear filters for smoothing and restoring images corrupted by noise. Therefore, the proposed spatial factor is fast and easy to implement, and can preserve more details. Secondly, the negative log-posterior is utilized as dissimilarity function by taking the prior probabilities into account, which can further improve the ability to identify the class for each pixel. Finally, to overcome the impact of intensity inhomogeneity, we approximate the bias field at the pixel-by-pixel level by using a linear combination of orthogonal polynomials. The fuzzy objective function is then integrated with the bias field estimation model to overcome the intensity inhomogeneity in the image and segment the brain MR images simultaneously.

Results

To demonstrate the performances of the proposed algorithm for the images with/without skull stripping, the first group of experiments is carried out in clinical 3T-weighted brain MR images which contain quite serious intensity inhomogeneity and noise. Then we quantitatively compare our algorithm to state-of-the-art segmentation approaches by using Jaccard similarity on benchmark images obtained from IBSR and BrainWeb with different level of noise and intensity inhomogeneity. The comparison results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can produce higher accuracy segmentation and has stronger ability of denoising, especially in the area with abundant textures and details.

Conclusion

In this paper, the RSCFCM algorithm is proposed by utilizing the negative log-posterior as the dissimilarity function, introducing a novel factor and integrating the bias field estimation model into the fuzzy objective function. This algorithm successfully overcomes the drawbacks of existing FCM-type clustering schemes and EM-type mixture models. Our statistical results (mean and standard deviation of Jaccard similarity for each tissue) on both synthetic and clinical images show that the proposed algorithm can overcome the difficulties caused by noise and bias fields, and is capable of improving over 5% segmentation accuracy comparing with several state-of-the-art algorithms.     

胎儿脑磁共振图像分割研究进展

医学影像是产前筛查、诊断、治疗引导和评估的重要工具,能有效避免胎儿脑的发育异常。近年来,磁共振成像在产前诊断中愈加重要,而实现自动、定量、精确地分析胎儿脑磁共振图像依赖于可靠的图像分割。因此,胎儿脑磁共振图像分割具有十分重要的临床意义与研究价值。由于胎儿图像中存在组织器官多、图像质量差及结构变化快等问题,胎儿脑磁共振图像的分割面临着巨大的困难与挑战。目前,尚未有文献对该领域的方法进行系统性的总结和分析,尤其是基于深度学习的方法。本文针对胎儿脑磁共振图像分割方法进行综述,首先,对胎儿脑磁共振图像的主要公开图谱/数据集进行详细说明;接着,对脑实质提取、组织分割和病灶分割方法进行全面的分类与分析;最后,对胎儿脑磁共振图像分割面临的挑战及未来的研究方向进行总结与展望。     

MRI Brain Tumor Segmentation with Intuitionist Possibilistic Fuzzy Clustering and Morphological Operations

Digital Image Processing (DIP) is a well-developed field in the biological sciences which involves classification and detection of tumour. In medical science, automatic brain tumor diagnosis is an important phase. Brain tumor detection is performed by Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems. The human image creation is greatly achieved by an approach namely medical imaging which is exploited for medical and research purposes. Recently Automatic brain tumor detection from MRI images has become the emerging research area of medical research. Brain tumor diagnosis mainly performed for obtaining exact location, orientation and area of abnormal tissues. Cancer and edema regions inference from brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) information is considered to be great challenge due to brain tumors complex structure, blurred borders, besides exterior features like noise. The noise compassion is mainly reduced along with segmentation stability by suggesting efficient hybrid clustering method merged with morphological process for brain cancer segmentation. Combined form of Median Modified Wiener filter (CMMWF) is chiefly deployed for denoising, and morphological operations which in turn eliminate nonbrain tissue, efficiently dropping technique’s sensitivity to noise. The proposed system contains the main phases such as preprocessing, brain tumor extraction and post processing. Image segmentation is greatly achieved by presenting Intuitionist Possibilistic Fuzzy Clustering (IPFC) algorithm. The algorithm’s stability is greatly enhanced by this clustering along with clustering parameters sensitivity reduction. Then, the post processing of images are done through morphological operations along with Hybrid Median filtering (HMF) for attaining exact tumors representations. Additionally, suggested algorithm is substantiated by comparing with other existing segmentation algorithms. The outcomes reveal that suggested algorithm achieves improved outcomes pertaining to accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and recall.     

A novel segmentation model for medical images with intensity inhomogeneity based on adaptive perturbation

In medical field, it remains challenging to accurately segment medical images due to low contrast, complex noises and intensity inhomogeneity. To overcome these obstacles, this paper provides a novel edge-based active contour model (ACM) for medical image segmentation. Specifically, an accurate regularization approach is presented to maintain the level set function with a signed distance property, which guarantees the stability of the evolution curve and the accuracy of the numerical computation. More significantly, an adaptive perturbation is integrated into the framework of the edge-based ACM. The perturbation technique can balance the stability of curve evolution and the accuracy of segmentation, which is key for segmenting medical images with intensity inhomogeneity. A number of experiments on both artificial and real medical images demonstrate that the proposed segmentation model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of robustness to noise and segmentation accuracy.

     

基于局部熵的主动轮廓模型

针对传统C-V模型对灰度分布不均匀图像分割效果不理想的问题,研究了一种基于局部熵的主动轮廓模型.首先,算法将局部熵的概念引入到C-V模型中,通过核函数获得局部区域的不均匀信息,来构建局部熵能量函数;其次,采用变分水平集的方法,最小化局部熵能量泛函,得到水平集的梯度下降流,根据梯度下降流不断更新水平集,获得目标轮廓图;最后,对4组灰度严重不均匀的图像进行仿真实验,并将本文算法与LBF方法和LGDF方法进行对比.实验结果表明,与LBF方法和LGDF方法相比,本文算法实现了灰度不均匀的图像的精确分割.     

局部熵驱动下的脑MR图像分割与偏移场恢复耦合模型

核磁共振图像受成像机制的影响往往导致图像中含有噪声以及偏移场,使得传统的图像分割方法很难得到较好的分割结果.为此,提出一种基于局部熵的分割与偏移场恢复耦合模型,首先在小邻域内构建基于模糊C均值(FCM)聚类模型的局部统计项并将偏移场信息耦合到模型中,以恢复图像偏移场;其次采用非局部信息来构建邻域正则项,使得模型在降低噪声影响的同时能有效地保留图像结构信息;最后在对局部能量项进行全局积分时引入局部熵信息,使得模型具有各向异性,从而对噪声和偏移场影响更具鲁棒性.实验结果表明,本文方法可以得到较准确的分割和偏移场矫正结果.     

用于脑部核磁共振图像分割的具有抗噪能力的BCFCM算法

脑部核磁共振成像(MRI)是脑疾病临床诊断的重要手段,而脑组织的准确分割则是其中一个重要的环节。然而MRI图像中普遍存在的噪声和偏移场给脑组织的准确分割造成了很大的困难。在MRI图像分割算法中,偏移场矫正模糊C-均值算法(BCFCM)在模糊C-均值聚类算法(FCM)的基础上增加了对偏移场的估计和空间信息的使用,可以很好地消除图像偏移场对分割造成的影响。但是BCFCM算法由于没有考虑到噪声对偏移场估计的影响,因此对高噪声图像的分割效果欠佳。针对MRI脑组织分割,在图像预处理过程中提出一种快速的分割方法来去除颅骨及其附属物。此外,提出基于BCFCM的改进算法,该改进算法在迭代过程中可以通过对噪声强度的估计来自适应地改变目标函数窗口的大小。同时,该算法引入高斯核函数对偏移场进行平滑处理,并通过阈值限制偏移场的估计值,以有效地避免偏移场的错误估计对分割结果的影响。实验结果表明,改进后的算法不仅可以有效准确地 分割脑组织,而且具有较强的抗噪声和处理偏移场的能力。     

模糊各向异性扩散人脑MR图像自动分割

目前对人脑磁共振图像的处理由于噪声等因素的影响,往往准确度不高。论文提出一种新的基于模糊各向异性扩散的人脑磁共振图像自动分割方法,该方法首先结合非线性扩散滤波构造混合信息场,在平滑目标内部同时处理强噪声区域,降低强噪声的影响且保留边界信息。然后利用FCM方法、形态学方法和标记法对混合场进行分析与处理,最终得到分割结果。对脑部MR图像分割的实验表明该方法的分割准确性较高,错误率约为1.3%。     

A nonlocal energy minimization approach to brain image segmentation with simultaneous bias field estimation and denoising

Image segmentation plays an important role in medical image analysis. The most widely used image segmentation algorithms, region-based methods that typically rely on the homogeneity of image intensities in the regions of interest, often fail to provide accurate segmentation results due to the existence of bias field, heavy noise and rich structures. In this paper, we incorporate nonlocal regularization mechanism in the coherent local intensity clustering formulation for brain image segmentation with simultaneously estimating bias field and denoising, specially preserving good structures. We define an energy functional with a local data fitting term, two nonlocal regularization terms for both image and membership functions, and a $L_2$ image fidelity term. By minimizing the energy, we get good segmentation results with well preserved structures. Meanwhile, the bias estimation and noise reduction can also be achieved. Experiments performed on synthetic and clinical brain magnetic resonance imaging data and comparisons with other methods are given to demonstrate that by introducing the nonlocal regularization mechanism, we can get more regularized segmentation results.     

Intensity standardization simplifies brain MR image segmentation

Typically, brain MR images present significant intensity variation across patients and scanners. Consequently, training a classifier on a set of images and using it subsequently for brain segmentation may yield poor results. Adaptive iterative methods usually need to be employed to account for the variations of the particular scan. These methods are complicated, difficult to implement and often involve significant computational costs. In this paper, a simple, non-iterative method is proposed for brain MR image segmentation. Two preprocessing techniques, namely intensity-inhomogeneity-correction, and more importantly MR image intensity standardization, used prior to segmentation, play a vital role in making the MR image intensities have a tissue-specific numeric meaning, which leads us to a very simple brain tissue segmentation strategy.Vectorial scale-based fuzzy connectedness and certain morphological operations are utilized first to generate the brain intracranial mask. The fuzzy membership value of each voxel within the intracranial mask for each brain tissue is then estimated. Finally, a maximum likelihood criterion with spatial constraints taken into account is utilized in classifying all voxels in the intracranial mask into different brain tissue groups. A set of inhomogeneity corrected and intensity standardized images is utilized as a training data set. We introduce two methods to estimate fuzzy membership values. In the first method, called SMG (for simple membership based on a gaussian model), the fuzzy membership value is estimated by fitting a multivariate Gaussian model to the intensity distribution of each brain tissue whose mean intensity vector and covariance matrix are estimated and fixed from the training data sets. The second method, called SMH (for simple membership based on a histogram), estimates fuzzy membership value directly via the intensity distribution of each brain tissue obtained from the training data sets. We present several studies to evaluate the performance of these two methods based on 10 clinical MR images of normal subjects and 10 clinical MR images of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) patients. A quantitative comparison indicates that both methods have overall better accuracy than the k-nearest neighbors (kNN) method, and have much better efficiency than the Finite Mixture (FM) model-based Expectation-Maximization (EM) method. Accuracy is similar for our methods and EM method for the normal subject data sets, but much better for our methods for the patient data sets.