Department of ECE, Sathyabama Institute of Science and Technology, Chennai, India.
School of CSE, Mar Ephraem College of Engineering and Technology, Elavuvilai, Marthandam, India.
J Digit Imaging. 2019 Apr;32(2):322-335. doi: 10.1007/s10278-018-0149-9.
Suspicious lesion or organ segmentation is a challenging task to be solved in most of the medical image analyses, medical diagnoses and computer diagnosis systems. Nevertheless, various image segmentation methods were proposed in the previous studies with varying success levels. But, the image segmentation problems such as lack of versatility, low robustness, high complexity and low accuracy in up-to-date image segmentation practices still remain unsolved. Fuzzy c-means clustering (FCM) methods are very well suited for segmenting the regions. The noise-free images are effectively segmented using the traditional FCM method. However, the segmentation result generated is highly sensitive to noise due to the negligence of spatial information. To solve this issue, super-pixel-based FCM (SPOFCM) is implemented in this paper, in which the influence of spatially neighbouring and similar super-pixels is incorporated. Also, a crow search algorithm is adopted for optimizing the influential degree; thereby, the segmentation performance is improved. In clinical applications, the SPOFCM feasibility is verified using the multi-spectral MRIs, mammograms and actual single spectrum on performing tumour segmentation tests for SPOFCM. Ultimately, the competitive, renowned segmentation techniques such as k-means, entropy thresholding (ET), FCM, FCM with spatial constraints (FCM_S) and kernel FCM (KFCM) are used to compare the results of proposed SPOFCM. Experimental results on multi-spectral MRIs and actual single-spectrum mammograms indicate that the proposed algorithm can provide a better performance for suspicious lesion or organ segmentation in computer-assisted clinical applications.
可疑病变或器官分割是大多数医学图像分析、医学诊断和计算机诊断系统中需要解决的一项具有挑战性的任务。然而,在以前的研究中提出了各种图像分割方法,其成功水平各不相同。但是,图像分割问题,如缺乏通用性、低健壮性、高复杂性和低准确性,在最新的图像分割实践中仍然没有得到解决。模糊 c 均值聚类(FCM)方法非常适合分割区域。传统的 FCM 方法可以有效地分割无噪声图像。然而,由于忽略了空间信息,分割结果对噪声非常敏感。为了解决这个问题,本文实现了基于超像素的 FCM(SPOFCM),其中包含了空间相邻和相似超像素的影响。此外,还采用了乌鸦搜索算法来优化影响程度,从而提高了分割性能。在临床应用中,使用多光谱 MRI、乳房 X 光片和实际单光谱对 SPOFCM 进行肿瘤分割测试,验证了 SPOFCM 的可行性。最终,使用竞争激烈的著名分割技术,如 k-means、熵阈值(ET)、FCM、具有空间约束的 FCM(FCM_S)和核 FCM(KFCM),比较了所提出的 SPOFCM 的结果。多光谱 MRI 和实际单光谱乳房 X 光片的实验结果表明,所提出的算法可以为计算机辅助临床应用中的可疑病变或器官分割提供更好的性能。