Automated Detection of Brain Stroke in MRI with Hybrid Fuzzy C-Means Clustering and Random Forest Classifier

Neuroimaging investigation is an essential parameter to detect infarct lesion in stroke patients. Precise detection of brain lesions is an important task related to impaired behavior. In this paper, we aimed to develop an automatic method to segment and classify infarct lesion in diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) of brain MRI. The method includes hybrid fuzzy a-means (HFCM) clustering in which the structure of c-means clustering is modified with rough sets and fuzzy sets to improve the segmentation performance with self-adjusted intensity thresholds. Quantitative evaluation was carried out on 128 MRI slices of brain image collected from ischemic stroke patients at the Department of Radiology, IMS and SUM Hospital, Bhubaneswar. The informative statistical features have been extracted using gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) and used to classify the types of stroke infarct according to the Oxfordshire Community Stroke Project (OCSP) classification. The parameters such as accuracy, Dice similarity index (DSI) and Jaccard index (JI) were utilized to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method in detecting the stroke lesions. The segmentation method achieved the average accuracy, DSI and JI of 96.8%, 95.8% and 92.2%, respectively, in support vector machine (SVM) classifier. The obtained results are higher in terms of random forest (RF) classification. With a high Dice coefficient of 0.958 and other evaluated parameters, the proposed method outperforms earlier published results.