학술논문

Automatic Segmentation and Classification of Multiple Sclerosis in Multichannel MRI
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng. Biomedical Engineering, IEEE Transactions on. 56(10):2461-2469 Oct, 2009
Subject
Bioengineering
Computing and Processing
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Multiple sclerosis
Magnetic resonance imaging
Image segmentation
Lesions
Brain
Biomedical imaging
Magnetic resonance
Anisotropic magnetoresistance
Shape
Humans
Brain imaging
MRI
multiple sclerosis
segmentation
Language
ISSN
0018-9294
1558-2531
Abstract
We introduce a multiscale approach that combines segmentation with classification to detect abnormal brain structures in medical imagery, and demonstrate its utility in automatically detecting multiple sclerosis (MS) lesions in 3-D multichannel magnetic resonance (MR) images. Our method uses segmentation to obtain a hierarchical decomposition of a multichannel, anisotropic MR scans. It then produces a rich set of features describing the segments in terms of intensity, shape, location, neighborhood relations, and anatomical context. These features are then fed into a decision forest classifier, trained with data labeled by experts, enabling the detection of lesions at all scales. Unlike common approaches that use voxel-by-voxel analysis, our system can utilize regional properties that are often important for characterizing abnormal brain structures. We provide experiments on two types of real MR images: a multichannel proton-density-, T2-, and T1-weighted dataset of 25 MS patients and a single-channel fluid attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) dataset of 16 MS patients. Comparing our results with lesion delineation by a human expert and with previously extensively validated results shows the promise of the approach.