Fuzzy Clustering-Based Segmentation of Manganese-Enhanced Neuronal Network Areas on MR Images

Mark J.R.J. Bouts¹, Jet P. van der Zijden¹, Wim M. Otte¹, Rick M. Dijkhuizen¹

Regional contrast enhancement on manganese-enhanced MR images is commonly measured using ROI analysis. However such methods are subject to user bias. We evaluated four fuzzy clustering methods to unbiasedly depict prominent areas of manganese enhancement in a neuronal tracing study in rat brain. A conventional Fuzzy C-Means approach was tested against three spatial contiguity constrained approaches. Spatial contiguity was defined either by a Markov random field (MRF) or neighborhood homogeneity weighting. The third method combined the latter approaches. Our study demonstrated highest accuracy and best overlap with manual outlines for a combination of MRF with neighborhood homogeneity weighting.