Virtual bacterium colony in 3D image segmentation

Several heuristic, biologically inspired strategies have been discovered in recent decades, including swarm intelligence algorithms. So far, their application to volumetric imaging data mining is, however, limited. This paper presents a new flexible swarm intelligence optimization technique for segmentation of various structures in three- or two-dimensional images. The agents of a self-organizing colony explore their host, use stigmergy to communicate themselves, and mark regions of interest leading to the object extraction. Detailed specification of the bacterium colony segmentation (BCS) technique in terms of both individual and social behaviour is described in this paper. The method is illustrated and evaluated using several experiments involving synthetic data, computed tomography studies, and ultrasonography images. The obtained results and observations are discussed in terms of parameter settings and potential application of the method in various segmentation tasks.