Segmentation of Brain MRI Using Wavelet Transform and Grammatical Bee Colony

Abstract

Multimodal Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is an imaging technique widely used in the diagnosis and treatment planning of patients. Lesion segmentation of brain MRI is one of the most important image analysis task in medical imaging. In this paper, a new method for the supervised segmentation of the lesion in brain MRI using Grammatical Bee Colony (GBC) is proposed. The segmentation process is adversely affected by the presence of noises and intensity inhomogeneities in the Magnetic Resonance (MR) images. Therefore, noises are removed from the images and intensity inhomogeneities are corrected in the pre-processing steps. A set of stationary wavelet features are extracted from the co-registered [Formula: see text]1-weighted ([Formula: see text]-[Formula: see text]), [Formula: see text]2-weighted ([Formula: see text]-[Formula: see text]) and Fluid–Attenuated Inversion Recovery (FLAIR) images after skull stripping. A classifier is evolved using the GBC to classify the tissues as healthy tissues or lesions. The GBC classifier is trained with extracted features. The trained classifier is used to segment the test Magnetic Resonance (MR) image into healthy tissues or lesion regions. Finally, the connected component labeling algorithm is used to extract the lesions from the segmented images in the post-processing step. Effectiveness of the proposed method is tested by identifying the brain lesions from a set of MR images.