Brain Tissue Segmentation and Bias Field Correction of MR Image Based on Spatially Coherent FCM with Nonlocal Constraints

Influenced by poor radio frequency field uniformity and gradient-driven eddy currents, intensity inhomogeneity (or bias field) and noise appear in brain magnetic resonance (MR) image. However, some traditional fuzzy c-means clustering algorithms with local spatial constraints often cannot obtain satisfactory segmentation performance. Therefore, an objective function based on spatial coherence for brain MR image segmentation and intensity inhomogeneity correction simultaneously is constructed in this paper. First, a novel similarity measure including local neighboring information is designed to improve the separability of MR data in Gaussian kernel mapping space without image smoothing, and the similarity measure incorporates the spatial distance and grayscale difference between cluster centroid and its neighborhood pixels. Second, the objective function with an adaptive nonlocal spatial regularization term is drawn upon to compensate the drawback of the local spatial information. Meanwhile, bias field information is also embedded into the similarity measure of clustering algorithm. From the comparison between the proposed algorithm and the state-of-the-art methods, our model is more robust to noise in the brain magnetic resonance image, and the bias field is also effectively estimated.