A HYBRID FIREFLY ALGORITHM WITH FUZZY-C MEAN ALGORITHM FOR MRI BRAIN SEGMENTATION

Image processing is one of the essential tasks to extract suspicious region and robust features from the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). A numbers of the segmentation algorithms were developed in order to satisfy and increasing the accuracy of brain tumor detection. In the medical image processing brain image segmentation is considered as a complex and challenging part. Fuzzy c-means is unsupervised method that has been implemented for clustering of the MRI and different purposes such as recognition of the pattern of interest and image segmentation. However; fuzzy c-means algorithm still suffers many drawbacks, such as low convergence rate, getting stuck in the local minima and vulnerable to initialization sensitivity. Firefly algorithm is a new population-based optimization method that has been used successfully for solving many complex problems. This paper proposed a new dynamic and intelligent clustering method for brain tumor segmentation using the hybridization of Firefly Algorithm (FA) with Fuzzy C-Means algorithm (FCM). In order to automatically segment MRI brain images and improve the capability of the FCM to automatically elicit the proper number and location of cluster centres and the number of pixels in each cluster in the abnormal (multiple sclerosis lesions) MRI images. The experimental results proved the effectiveness of the proposed FAFCM in enhancing the performance of the traditional FCM clustering. Moreover; the superiority of the FAFCM with other state-of-the-art segmentation methods is shown qualitatively and quantitatively. Conclusion: A novel efficient and reliable clustering algorithm presented in this work, which is called FAFCM based on the hybridization of the firefly algorithm with fuzzy c-mean clustering algorithm. Automatically; the hybridized algorithm has the capability to cluster and segment MRI brain images.