An Improved MRI Brain Segmentation Algorithm Based on AntPart

Zhang Dong1,2,Zeng Wenhua1,2

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Key Laboratory for Intelligent Information Technology of Fujian Province 2 Software School of Xiamen University, Xiamen 361005, P.R. China ZhangDong66@gmail.com B. Behavior of real ants Initially, the ants are in the nest, and each ant moves towards the food sites to prey .The working ants can remember the sites they have visited and can exchange the information with other ants. The oldest ants move away further than the young ones. C. The main algorithm So there are two kinds of ants: working ants and master ants. Working ants are in charge of clustering data to a class .At first, the data are all put in the nest, and each working ant moves data to a class. The ant searches in its own memory to find whether there exists a datum similar enough, if so, these two data belongs to the same class, if not ,the common memory will be searched. If no sufficiently similar data are found in the common memory, and all the objects in this memory are all dissimilar enough to the carried datum, a new class is created which only contains this datum and the class is put in the memory of the ant and the common memory at the same time. Otherwise, the datum is returned to the nest and the similarity threshold and dissimilarity threshold of this datum are updated. Master ants have two roles: their first role is to recalculate the class centers and move the wrong data to the right class .The second one is to merge the close centers To reclassify the data, a master ant does: a) From the class C1, choose the datum D which is furthest from the centre of C1. b) Seek class C2 (C1 is different from C2) whose centers G2 is closet to the datum D. c) If the distance between G2 and D is smaller than that between G1 and D, move D from C1 to C2. To merge the close centers, we merge the closet two centers first, until no centers can be merged. IV. THE IMPROVED ANTPART BASED CLUSTERING ALGORITHM

AbstractIn this paper, a new algorithm for MRI Brain Segmentation is proposed, which is based on the AntPart algorithm [1] .This algorithm proposed partitiones the brain structure into three parts--white matter, grey matter, and cerebrospinal fluid according to the grayvalues of pixels. The main algorithm compares each pixel with the nearest class center C ,all the data belonging to class C ,all the data carried by one ant chosen randomly and all the data at(at most) four steps in order,and optimize the performance by recalculating the class centers, merging the close classes and reclassfing the data classified wrongly . The performances of this algorithm are compared with those of two other ones : K-means and FCM. The results show that the method proposed is more accurate. Keywords- segmentation; antPart; MRI; brainIntroduction

I.

INTRODUCTION

Image segmentation is an important field of data clustering. The methods of image segmentation are mainly as follows: thresholding, edge detection, clustering and region growing and merging [2]. Image segmentation plays an important role in MRI Brain analysis [3].By segmenting the brain structure into three parts-- white matter, grey matter, and cerebrospinal fluid according to the grayvalues of pixels, the brain can be observed more clearly. This paper brings the AntPart algorithm into the MRI Brain segmentation field. To enhance the accuracy of clustering, we setup the initial clustering centers by finding the peaks of the image histograms instead of the original random method [4]. Besides, we modify the main comparing progress to make the clustering process more reasonable. II. DATA PREPROCESSING

Since the image segmentation effect would be affected by the noises and backgrounds, preprocess is necessary. We pick out the obvious background pixels. III. DESCRIPTION OF ANTPART ALGORITHM

A. Background AntPart [1] is an algorithm for the unsupervised classification problem using ants proposed by Lotfi Admane, Karima Benatchba , Mouloud Koudil, Lamri Siad, and Said Maziz. Its inspired by prey behavior of a special kind of ants named P. apicalis [6].
978-1-4244-5586-7/10/$26.00 C 2010 IEEE

A. Comparation and improvements The clustering process of AntPart algorithm has two drawbacks: a) It doesnt compare the datum with the class centers but only the individual datum (either in the local memory or the common memory).A class center contains the whole information of all the data in the class and is the most important criterion for clustering.

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b) The datum is always compared with the data in the local memory of the ant, which in fact is run randomly. Both these two drawbacks will affect the accuracy of the clustering result. According to the problems, the clustering process of a datum in our algorithm is: c) For the datum D to be classified, find the closet class center C in the common memory, if D and C are similar enough, drop D in the class. d) Else, seek a similar datum D+ in the class found above, if there is one, drop D in the class. e) Else, do as the original AntPart does. It should be pointed out that when searching in the common memory, its not necessary to compare D with the data in the class found at step b, so the algorithm proposed doesnt cost much more time. Besides, we initial clustering centers as the peaks of the grayscale histogram and adjust them to fit the MRI brain field, which will help to find good initial centers. To avoid the peaks are too close, we set a threshold of the distance between peaks, if the distance of two peaks is less than the threshold, the smaller peak would be abandoned. After finding the peaks, we merge the centers which are close enough, the closest two ones would be merged first. B. Main Algorithm The main part which is different from the original algorithm is as Fig. 1: V. TEST AND RESULT

This section presents the experiment results by applying methods proposed and compares it with that by K-means and FCM algorithms. The evaluation function is contrast aross region (GC) and the variance test function (VT). GC=

Begin While there are still data in the nest Do Select a datum Di in the nest Find the closet class center Ci in the common memory. If Di and Ci are similar enough Drop Di in the class. Else Seek a similar datum D+ in the class found above. If Di and D+ are similar enough Drop D in the class. Else Seek the most similar datum D+ in the local memory of the ant. If D and D+ are similar enough Drop D in the class of D+. Else Seek the most similar datum D+ in the common memory If D and D+ are similar enough Drop D in the class of D+ . Else If all the data of the common memory are sufficiently dissimilar to D Then A new class is created which contains only the datum D. Else Update the thresholds of similarity and dissimilarity of D in order to increase its chances to be classified at the next iteration End
Fig. 1 Working ant algorithm

1 VT= 2 n

g
i

 g i 1 

g

(2) Where gi is the average grayscale of region i. g is the average value of the clustering centers and n is the num of the clustering centers. The GC and VT are both the bigger the better [3]. We choose two brain image to evaluate the results of the proposed method and compare them with those of the Kmeans algorithm [7] and FCM [8] algorithm. The original images are as Fig. 2:

We set the similarity threshold as 0.9 and the dissimilarity one as 0.1 initially, and the center similarity threshold for merging centers is set as 0.9.The result of the proposed method is as Fig. 3:

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Fig.2 Original images

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Fig.3 Results of the proposed algorithm

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The result of the K-mean algorithm is as Fig. 4:

the main comparing steps and make more research on initialing the clustering centers to get more accurate results. REFERENCES
[1] Lotfi Admane, Karima Benatchba , Mouloud Koudil, Lamri Siad, Said Maziz,AntPart: an algorithm for the unsupervised classification problem using ants, Applied Mathematics and Computation 180 (2006) 16 28 H.D. Cheng, X.H. Jiang, Y. Sun, J.L. Wang, Color image segmentation: advances and prospects, Pattern Recognition 34 (12) (2001) 22592281. Li Chenling, Zeng Wenhua ,Zhuang Jiahe An Improved AntTree Algorithm for MRI Brain Segmentation. Proceedings of 2008 IEEE International Symposium on IT in Medicine and Education Xin Fang,Weidong Zhao,Xiaochun Yang. Image segmentation based on improved Ant-Tree algorithm.Computer Application.2008, pp.1240-1243. (in chinese) Rafael C. Gonzalez and Richard E. Woods, Digital Image Processing (second edition),Electronic Industries Publisher , china,2007. N. Monmarche , Algorithmes de fourmis artificielles: application a` l optimisation et la classification. PhD Thesis, University of Tours,France, 2000. Jiawei Han and Micheline Kamber, Data MiningConcepts and Techniques (second edition), Morgan Kaufmann Publisher, 2006. D. L. Pham and J. L. Prince, An adaptive fuzzy C-means algorithm for image segmentation in the presence of intensity inhomogeneities, Pattern Recognit. Lett, vol. 20,pp. 5768, 1999.

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Fig.4 Results of K-mean algorithm

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The result of the FCM algorithm is as Fig. 5:

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Fig.5 Results of FCM algorithm

The result shows that the proposed algorithm can distinguish more details than other two ones. The statistical contrast result is as Table 1 and Table 2 :
TABLE I. TEST RESULTS FOR PICTURE A

TABLE II.

TEST RESULTS FOR PICTURE B

CONCLUTION In this paper, we propose a new segmentation method which is based on the AntPart algorithm to segment MRI brain into three parts: white matter, gray matter and cerebrospinal fluid .Comparing the result with those of the K-mean algorithm and FCM algorithm, we find the result is more accurate. For the further work, we will try to modify

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