Brain Tissue Segmentation from the MR Images Affected by Noise and Intensity Inhomogeneity Using a Novel Linguistic Fuzzifier-Based FCM Algorithm

Brain MRI is mainly affected by noise and intensity inhomogeneity (IIH) during its acquisition. Brain tissue segmentation plays an important role in biomedical research and clinical applications. Brain tissue segmentation is essential for physicians for the proper diagnosis and right treatment of brain-related disorders. Fuzzy C-means (FCM) clustering is one of the widely used algorithms for brain tissue segmentation. Traditional FCM has the limitations of misclassification of pixels that leads to inaccurate cluster centers. Due to this, it is unable to address the issues of noise and IIH. In FCM there exists uncertainty in controlling the fuzziness of the clusters as the fuzzifier is fixed. This paper proposed a novel linguistic fuzzifier-based FCM (LFFCM) to overcome the limitations of traditional FCM during brain tissue segmentation from the MR images. In this method, a linguistic fuzzifier is used instead of a fixed fuzzifier. The spatial information incorporated in the membership function can reduce the misclassification of pixels. The proposed LFFCM can handle IIH, due to having highly accurate cluster centers. The inclusion of the adaptive weights in the membership function results in accurate cluster centers. Various brain MR images are used to evaluate the proposed technique and the results are compared with some state-of-the-art techniques. The results reveal that the proposed method performed better than the other.