Multi-agent segmentation for 3D medical images

Many medical image segmentation techniques have been proposed by lots of authors but they are mainly dedicated to particular solutions. There is no generic method for solving the image segmentation problem. The difficulty comes from that two types of noise are presented in medical images: physical noise due to the acquisition system, for example, Optical, X-rays and MRI, and physiological noise due to the patient status. In this paper, we present a social spiders method which implements a multiagent system with a biological behavior. After a presentation of the principles of this method, we will compare its results on brain MRI images with two other ones: Region Growing and Otsu thresholding methods. The segmentation method based on social spiders appears to be more robust to noise than classical methods on brain MRI images. Drawbacks of this method are also identified and solutions are proposed as a conclusion.