Blind source separation with mixture models - A hybrid approach to MR brain classification.

The development of automated segmentation approaches, which do not suffer from excessive computational burden and intra- and inter-observer variability, is the holy grail of multispectral MR image classification. A new segmentation approach to the data set of MR brain images using a combination of Independent Component Analysis (ICA) with a generalized version of the popular Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) for unsupervised classification is proposed to be superior to conventional methods in this paper. We propose to optimize the parameters of the mixture model using a meta-heuristic approach like the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to escape the problem of local traps (maxima or minima).