Adaptive fuzzy segmentation of 3D MR brain images

A fuzzy c-means based adaptive clustering algorithm is proposed for the fuzzy segmentation of 3D MR brain images, which are typically corrupted by noise and intensity non-uniformity (INU) artifact. The proposed algorithm enforces the spatial continuity constraint to account for the spatial correlations between image voxels, resulting in the suppression of noise and classification ambiguity. The INU artifact is compensated for by the introduction of a pseudo-3D bias field, which is modeled as a stack of smooth B-spline surfaces with continuity enforced across slices. The efficacy of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated experimentally using both simulated and real MR images.