Ambiguous D-means fusion clustering algorithm based on ambiguous set theory: Special application in clustering of CT scan images of COVID-19

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been considered one of the most critical diseases of the 21st century. Only early detection can aid in the prevention of personal transmission of the disease. Recent scientific research reports indicate that computed tomography (CT) images of COVID-19 patients exhibit acute infections and lung abnormalities. However, analyzing these CT scan images is very difficult because of the presence of noise and low-resolution. Therefore, this study suggests the development of a new early detection method to detect abnormalities in chest CT scan images of COVID-19 patients. By this motivation, a novel image clustering algorithm, called ambiguous D-means fusion clustering algorithm (ADMFCA), is introduced in this study. This algorithm is based on the newly proposed ambiguous set theory and associated concepts. The ambiguous set is used in the proposed technique to characterize the ambiguity associated with grayscale values of pixels as true, false, true-ambiguous and false-ambiguous. The proposed algorithm performs the clustering operation on the CT scan images based on the entropies of different grayscale values. Finally, a final outcome image is obtained from the clustered images by image fusion operation. The experiment is carried out on 40 different CT scan images of COVID-19 patients. The clustered images obtained by the proposed algorithm are compared to five well-known clustering methods. The comparative study based on statistical metrics shows that the proposed ADMFCA is more efficient than the five existing clustering methods. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.