A fully automatic, multiscale fuzzy c-means (MsFCM) classification method for MR images is presented in this paper. We use a diffusion filter to process MR images and to construct a multiscale image series. A multiscale fuzzy C-means classification method is applied along the scales from the coarse to fine levels. The objective function of the conventional fuzzy c-means (FCM) method is modified to allow multiscale classification processing where the result from a coarse scale supervises the classification in the next fine scale. The method is robust for noise and low-contrast MR images because of its multiscale diffusion filtering scheme. The new method was compared with the conventional FCM method and a modified FCM (MFCM) method. Validation studies were performed on synthesized images with various contrasts and on the McGill brain MR image database. Our MsFCM method consistently performed better than the conventional FCM and MFCM methods. The MsFCM method achieved an overlap ratio of greater than 90% as validated by the ground truth. Experiments results on real MR images were given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Our multiscale fuzzy c-means classification method is accurate and robust for various MR images. It can provide a quantitative tool for neuroimaging and other applications.
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