Segmentation of MRI data using multi-objective antlion based improved fuzzy c-means

Accurate segmentation of brain tissues in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data plays critical role in the clinical diagnostic and treatment planning. The presence of noise and artifacts in MRI data degrades the performance of segmentation algorithms. In this view, the present study proposes a complete unsupervised clustering based multi-objective modified fuzzy c-mean (MOFCM) segmentation algorithm, which inculcates multi-objective antlion optimization (MOALO) to minimize the cluster compactness and fuzzy hyper-volume fitness functions. The output segmented image corresponds to minimum value of partition entropy in the obtained solution set. The present study integrates proposed MOFCM with a new cluster number validity index, which allows user not to provide number of segments in image as an input. The proposed MOFCM algorithm is extensively validated on seventy two synthetic images corrupted with different levels of Gaussian, Speckle and Rician noises, forty simulated BrainWeb MRI images suffered from noise and inhomogeneity, and 10 real IBSR MRI dataset of images. The results are compared with existing popular clustering based algorithms, and supervised deep learning based algorithms, i.e. UNet, SegNet and QuickNAT. The proposed MOFCM algorithm demonstrate the superior segmentation performance in comparison to popular FCM based clustering algorithms, SegNet and UNet, whereas the segmentation results of proposed MOFCM are at par with QuickNAT.