An improved spatial FCM algorithm for cardiac image segmentation

Abstract

Image segmentation is one of challenging field in medical image processing. Segmentation of cardiac wall is one of challenging work and it is very important step in evaluation of heart functionality by existing methods. For cardiac image analysis, Fuzzy C- Means (FCM) algorithm proved to be superior over the other clustering approaches in segmentation field. However, the nave FCM algorithm is sensitive to noise because of not considering the spatial information in the image. In this paper an improved FCM algorithm is formulated by incorporating the spatial domain neighborhood information into the membership function for clustering (ISFCM). In this paper we applied improved Fuzzy c-Means with spatial information for left ventricular wall segmentation. Obtained results showed that the proposed method can segment cardiac wall automatically with acceptable accuracy. The comparison of proposed method with nave FCM proved that ISFCM can segment with more accuracy than nave FCM.