Segmentation of Magnetic Resonance Brain Images Using the Advanced Ant Colony Optimization Technique

MR Brain Image Segmentation is an important step in brain image analysis. It facilitates the automatic interpretation or diagnosis that helps in surgical planning, estimating the changes in the brain’s volume for various types of tissues, and recognizing different neural disorders. Many neurological disorders like epilepsy, Alzheimer’s, tumor, and cancer can be effectively quantified and analyzed by finding the volume of the brain tissues such as White Matter (WM), Gray Matter (GM), and Cerebro Spinal Fluids (CSF). In manual segmentation of brain MRIs physicians manually determines the boundaries of different objects of interest and it is time-consuming and difficult. Thus, several accurate automatic brain MRI segmentation techniques with different levels of complexity have been proposed. This paper proposes an advanced thresholding technique for the segmentation of brain MRIs based on the biologically inspired Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm. Here the texture features are assumed as heuristic data. The experimental results for the T1-weighted brain MRIs have shown high accuracy than the conventional such as Fuzzy C-Means (FCM), Expectation-Maximization (EM), Improved Bacterial Foraging Algorithm (IBFA), and Improved Particle Swarm Optimization (IPSO).