Medical Image Segmentation Based on Edge Detection Techniques

Abstract

In this article a new combination of image segmentation techniques including K-means clustering, watershed transform, region merging and growing algorithm was proposed to segment computed tomography(CT) and magnetic resonance(MR) medical images.The first stage in the proposed system is "preprocessing" for required image enhancement, cropped, and convert the images into .mat or png ...etc image file formats then the image will be segmented using combination methods (clustering , region growing, and watershed, thresholding). Some initial over-segmentation appears due to the high sensitivity of the watershed algorithm to the gradient image intensity variations. Here, K- means and region growing with correct thresholding value are used to overcome that over segmentations. in our system the number of pixels of segmented area is calculated which is very important for medical image analysis for diseases or medicine effects on affected area of human body. also displaying the edge map.The results show that using clustering method output to region growing as input image, gives accurate and very good results compare with watershed technique which depends on gradient of input image, the mean and the threshold values which are chosen manually. Also the results show that the manual selection of the threshold value for the watershed is not as good as automatically selecting, where data misses may be happen.