Segmentation of corpus callosum based on tensor fuzzy clustering algorithm

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The corpus callosum in the midsagittal plane plays a crucial role in the early diagnosis of diseases. When the anisotropy of the diffusion tensor in the midsagittal plane is calculated, the anisotropy of corpus callosum is close to that of the fornix, which leads to blurred boundary of the segmentation region. OBJECTIVE: To apply a fuzzy clustering algorithm combined with new spatial information to achieve accurate segmentation of the corpus callosum in the midsagittal plane in diffusion tensor images. METHODS: In this algorithm, a fixed region of interest is selected from the midsagittal plane, and the anisotropic filtering algorithm based on tensor is implemented by replacing the gradient direction of the structural tensor with an eigenvector, thus filtering the diffusion tensor of region of interest. Then, the iterative clustering center based on K-means clustering is used as the initial clustering center of tensor fuzzy clustering algorithm. Taking filtered diffusion tensor as input data and different metrics as similarity measures, the neighborhood diffusion tensor voxel calculation method of Log Euclidean framework is introduced in the membership function calculation, and tensor fuzzy clustering algorithm is proposed. In this study, MGH35 data from the Human Connectome Project (HCP) are tested and the variance, accuracy and specificity of the experimental results are discussed. RESULTS: Segmentation results of three groups of subjects in MGH35 data are reported. The average segmentation accuracy is 97.34%, and the average specificity is 98.43%. CONCLUSIONS: When segmenting the corpus callosum of diffusion tensor imaging, our method cannot only effective denoise images, but also achieve high accuracy and specificity.