Medical image segmentation using hybrid Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) and expectation maximization algorithm

Abstract

Early detection of diseases in men and women can improve treatment and reduce the risk involved in human life. Nowadays techniques which are non-invasive in nature are popularly used to detect the various types of diseases. Histopathological analysis plays a major role in finding the nature of the disease through medical images. Manual interpretation of these medical imaging takes time, is tedious, subjective, and can have human errors. It has also been discovered that the interpretation of these images varies amongst diagnostic labs. As computer power and memory capacity have increased, methodologies and medical image processing techniques have been developed to interpret and analyse these images as a substitute for human involvement. The challenge lies in devising an efficient pre-processing technique that helps in analysing, processing and preparing the medical image for further diagnostics. This research provides a hybrid technique that reduces noise in the NITFI medical image by using a 2D adaptive median filter at level 1. The edges of the filtered medical image are preserved using the modified CLAHE algorithm which preserves the local contrast of the image. Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm extracts the ROI part of the image which helps in easy and accurate identification of the disease. All the three steps are run over the 3D image slices of a NIFTI image. The proposed method proves that it achieves close to ideal RMSE, PSNR and UQI values as well as achieves an average runtime of 37.193 seconds for EM per slice.