Brain tissue segmentation based on spatial information fusion by Dempster-Shafer theory

Abstract

As a result of noise and intensity non-uniformity, automatic segmentation of brain tissue in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a challenging task. In this study a novel brain MRI segmentation approach is presented which employs Dempster-Shafer theory (DST) to perform information fusion. In the proposed method, fuzzy c-mean (FCM) is applied to separate features and then the outputs of FCM are interpreted as basic belief structures. The salient aspect of this paper is the interpretation of each FCM output as a belief structure with particular focal elements. The results of the proposed method are evaluated using Dice similarity and Accuracy indices. Qualitative and quantitative comparisons show that our method performs better and is more robust than the existing method.