Mutated Aquila Optimizer for assisting brain tumor segmentation

Abstract

Image processing is a crucial effort to discover suspicious regions and robust features from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Many segmentation algorithms have been proposed to increase the accuracy of brain tumor detection. However, brain image segmentation is considered a complex and challenging step in medical image processing. K-means is an unsupervised learning method for MRI image clustering and other tasks such as image segmentation and pattern identification of interest. However, the K-means algorithm still has many shortcomings, including a low convergence rate, a tendency to get stuck in local minima, and sensitivity to initialization. An improved version of Aquila Optimizer (AO) boosted with an alternative selection scheme and Cauchy mutation, called Mutated Aquila Optimizer (MAO), and the K-Means algorithm were combined to create a new dynamic and intelligent clustering method for brain tumor segmentation. The proposed MAO-Kmeans approach aims to increase the ability of K-Means to automatically extract the correct number and location of cluster centers and the number of pixels in each cluster in abnormal MRI images (multiple sclerosis lesions). The experimental results on the Brain Tumor Segmentation dataset (BraTS 2020) demonstrated the effectiveness of the MAO-Kmeans method in improving the performance of conventional K-means clustering. Furthermore, qualitative and quantitative comparisons between MAO-Kmeans and the other 12 state-of-the-art segmentation techniques (which include machine learning, artificial neural network, and deep learning-based methods) demonstrate the superiority of our proposed algorithm.