Automated image detection of white matter changes of the brain is essentially helpful in providing a quantitative measure for studying the association of white matter lesions with other types of biomedical data. Such study allows the possibility of several medical hypothesis validations which lead to therapeutic treatment and prevention. This paper presents a new clustering-based segmentation approach for detecting white matter changes in magnetic resonance imaging with particular reference to cognitive decline in the elderly. The proposed method is formulated using the principles of fuzzy c-means algorithm and geostatistics.