A Medical Image Segmentation Method Based on SOM and Wavelet Transforms

Image segmentation plays a crucial role in many medical imaging applications and is an important but inherently difficult problem. This paper discusses the method that classifies unsupervised image using a Kohonen self-organizing map neural network. This method has two problems: training time of the network is too long and the classified result and quantity are much easily influenced by the noise of image. Two-dimensional Discrete Wavelet Transforms (DWT) decompose MRI image into the small size and denoise approximation images. Kohonen self-organizing map neural network is trained with approximation image, then trained neural network classify pixels of original image. Training time of the network is markedly decreased and the classified quality influenced by the noise of image is markedly reduced. The technique presented here has shown a very encouraging level of performance for the problem of segmentation in MRI image of the head.