Técnicas de computação natural para segmentação de imagens médicas

Image segmentation is one of the image processing problems that deserves special attention from the scientific community. This work studies unsupervised methods to clustering and pattern recognition applicable to medical image segmentation. Natural Computing based methods have shown very attractive in such tasks and are studied here as a way to verify it's applicability in medical image segmentation. This work treats to implement the following methods: GKA (Genetic K-means Algorithm), GFCMA (Genetic FCM Algorithm), PSOKA (PSO and K-means based Clustering Algorithm) and PSOFCM (PSO and FCM based Clustering Algorithm). Besides, as a way to evaluate the results given by the algorithms, clustering validity indexes are used as quantitative measure. Visual and qualitative evaluations are realized also, mainly using data given by the BrainWeb brain simulator as ground truth

Novos métodos determinísticos para gerar centros iniciais dos grupos no algoritmo fuzzy C-Means e variantes

Data clustering is applied to various fields such as data mining, image processing and pattern recognition technique. Clustering algorithms splits a data set into clusters such that elements within the same cluster have a high degree of similarity, while elements belonging to different clusters have a high degree of dissimilarity. The Fuzzy C-Means Algorithm (FCM) is a fuzzy clustering algorithm most used and discussed in the literature. The performance of the FCM is strongly affected by the selection of the initial centers of the clusters. Therefore, the choice of a good set of initial cluster centers is very important for the performance of the algorithm. However, in FCM, the choice of initial centers is made randomly, making it difficult to find a good set. This paper proposes three new methods to obtain initial cluster centers, deterministically, the FCM algorithm, and can also be used in variants of the FCM. In this work these initialization methods were applied in variant ckMeans.With the proposed methods, we intend to obtain a set of initial centers which are close to the real cluster centers. With these new approaches startup if you want to reduce the number of iterations to converge these algorithms and processing time without affecting the quality of the cluster or even improve the quality in some cases. Accordingly, cluster validation indices were used to measure the quality of the clusters obtained by the modified FCM and ckMeans algorithms with the proposed initialization methods when applied to various data sets

Contribuições aos Processos de Clustering com Base em Métricas não-Euclidianas

In this work we present a new clustering method that groups up points of a data set in classes. The method is based in a algorithm to link auxiliary clusters that are obtained using traditional vector quantization techniques. It is described some approaches during the development of the work that are based in measures of distances or dissimilarities (divergence) between the auxiliary clusters. This new method uses only two a priori information, the number of auxiliary clusters Na and a threshold distance dt that will be used to decide about the linkage or not of the auxiliary clusters. The number os classes could be automatically found by the method, that do it based in the chosen threshold distance dt, or it is given as additional information to help in the choice of the correct threshold. Some analysis are made and the results are compared with traditional clustering methods. In this work different dissimilarities metrics are analyzed and a new one is proposed based on the concept of negentropy. Besides grouping points of a set in classes, it is proposed a method to statistical modeling the classes aiming to obtain a expression to the probability of a point to belong to one of the classes. Experiments with several values of Na e dt are made in tests sets and the results are analyzed aiming to study the robustness of the method and to consider heuristics to the choice of the correct threshold. During this work it is explored the aspects of information theory applied to the calculation of the divergences. It will be explored specifically the different measures of information and divergence using the Rényi entropy. The results using the different metrics are compared and commented. The work also has appendix where are exposed real applications using the proposed method