Medical Image Segmentation using a Multi-Agent System Approach

Image segmentation techniques have been an invaluable task in many domains such as quantification of tissue volumes, medical diagnosis, anatomical structure study, treatment planning, etc. Image segmentation is still a debatable problem due to some issues. Firstly, most image segmentation solutions are problem-based. Secondly, medical image segmentation methods generally have restrictions because medical images have very similar gray level and texture among the interested objects. The goal of this work is to design a framework to extract simultaneously several objects of interest from Computed Tomography (CT) images by using some priori-knowledge. Our method used properties of agent in a multi-agent environment. The input image is divided into several sub-images, and each local agent works on a sub-image and tries to mark each pixel as a specific region by means of given priori-knowledge. During this time the local agent marks each cell of sub-image individually. Moderator agent checks the outcome of all agents' work to produce final segmented image. The experimental results for CT images demonstrated segmentation accuracy around 91% and efficiency of 7 seconds.