In this paper, an adaptive spatial clustering method is presented for automatic brain MR image segmentation, which is based on a competitive learning algorithm-self-organizing map (SOM). We use a pattern recognition approach in terms of feature generation and classifier design. Firstly, a multi-dimensional feature vector is constructed using local spatial information. Then, an adaptive spatial growing hierarchical SOM (ASGHSOM) is proposed as the classifier, which is an extension of SOM, fusing multi-scale segmentation with the competitive learning clustering algorithm to overcome the problem of overlapping grey-scale intensities on boundary regions. Furthermore, an adaptive spatial distance is integrated with ASGHSOM, in which local spatial information is considered in the cluster-ing process to reduce the noise effect and the classification ambiguity. Our proposed method is validated by extensive experiments using both simulated and real MR data with varying noise level, and is compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms.