Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) often suffers from noise and Intensity Non-Uniformity (INU), making segmentation a challenging task. The Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) algorithm, a widely used clustering method for image segmentation, is highly sensitive to noise and its convergence rate depends on data distribution. FCM employs the Euclidean distance metric, which fails to adapt to variations in data point distributions within compact and similarly shaped clusters. Additionally, this metric is not locally adaptive to different cluster shapes. This paper introduces a Conditional Spatial Gustafson-Kessel Clustering Algorithm based on Information Theory (CSGKIT) to address these challenges. First, information theory is incorporated to enhance the algorithm's robustness against noise and improve segmentation accuracy. Second, the Mahalanobis distance replaces the Euclidean distance to better accommodate cluster shapes during the clustering process. Finally, a conditional spatial approach uses a fuzzy-weighted membership matrix to incorporate local spatial interactions between neighboring pixels. The proposed CSGKIT algorithm is evaluated on two datasets: the BrainWeb simulated dataset and the Open Access Series of Imaging Studies (OASIS) dataset. Experimental results indicate that CSGKIT outperforms other FCM-based algorithms in segmentation accuracy across various tissue types.
Jafargholkhanloo et al. (Wed,) studied this question.