DCE-MRI data analysis for cancer area classification.
Methods Inf Med
; 48(3): 248-53, 2009.
Article
em En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-19387513
ABSTRACT
OBJECTIVES:
The paper aims at improving the support of medical researchers in the context of in-vivo cancer imaging. Morphological and functional parameters obtained by dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI) techniques are analyzed, which aim at investigating the development of tumor microvessels. The main contribution consists in proposing a machine learning methodology to segment automatically these MRI data, by isolating tumor areas with different meaning, in a histological sense.METHODS:
The proposed approach is based on a three-step procedure i) robust feature extraction from raw time-intensity curves, ii) voxel segmentation, and iii) voxel classification based on a learning-by-example approach. In the first step, few robust features that compactly represent the response of the tissue to the DCE-MRI analysis are computed. The second step provides a segmentation based on the mean shift (MS) paradigm, which has recently shown to be robust and useful for different and heterogeneous clustering tasks. Finally, in the third step, a support vector machine (SVM) is trained to classify voxels according to the labels obtained by the clustering phase (i.e., each class corresponds to a cluster). Indeed, the SVM is able to classify new unseen subjects with the same kind of tumor.RESULTS:
Experiments on different subjects affected by the same kind of tumor evidence that the extracted regions by both the MS clustering and the SVM classifier exhibit a precise medical meaning, as carefully validated by the medical researchers. Moreover, our approach is more stable and robust than methods based on quantification of DCE-MRI data by means of pharmacokinetic models.CONCLUSIONS:
The proposed method allows to analyze the DCE-MRI data more precisely and faster than previous automated or manual approaches.
Texto completo:
1
Coleções:
01-internacional
Base de dados:
MEDLINE
Assunto principal:
Processamento de Imagem Assistida por Computador
/
Imageamento por Ressonância Magnética
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Neoplasias
Limite:
Humans
Idioma:
En
Ano de publicação:
2009
Tipo de documento:
Article