earticle

영어

Errors in the scanning procedures lead to uncertainties when trying to segment the scanned images. Fuzzy c-means is a clustering method that can be applied to segment images with uncertainty estimates. Bias-corrected fuzzy c-means (BCFCM) clustering compensates for two sources of uncertainty by modeling noise and bias fields during the segmentation process. In this paper, we present an approach to improve BCFCM clustering and apply it to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data of the human brain. Our approach is based on two variants of BCFCM clustering, the classical one and the one with distance-based weights. We improve both variants by slightly modifying their main algorithms for better bias field estimation. To evaluate the improved algorithms, we apply the algorithms to synthetic data, simulated MRI brain data, and real MRI brain data with ground truth in form of manual segmentation. All experiment results show that our improved methods outperform the original methods in both the segmentation accuracy and efficiency (the number of iterations).