Inflammatory muscle disease is a group of rare idiopathic conditions that cause progressive skeletal muscle weakness. Diagnosis typically requires an assortment of clinical tests, including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the thigh muscles to assess fat infiltration and inflammation. We hypothesise that features from multi-spectral MRI can accurately predict patient diagnosis, without the need for additional tests. A novel method is presented using computer-extracted features of the T1-STIR bivariate histogram to detect disease. The dataset comprised of 78 image-pairs from 8 patients with inflammatory muscle disease symptoms and 61 image-pairs from 9 control cases with no disease. T1 and STIR slices were co-registered and the background discarded. A feature vector was designed to measure the distribution of standardised intensity values (e.g. standard deviation, kurtosis, gini) for the muscle, fat, and leg regions of the bivariate histogram. Feature dimensionality was reduced using a combined leave-one-out and k-folds cross-validation method to select the most important features. A Bayes network was trained to predicted patient diagnosis on a per-slice basis, 10- fold cross-validated. The system attained 92% sensitivity and 82% specificity (ROC area 0.93). These results support the hypothesis that accurate diagnosis of inflammatory muscle disease is possible using MRI alone, without the need for additional clinical tests, with the potential benefit of faster diagnosis and better care for patients with this group of rare conditions.

Date Published: 20 March 2015
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 9414, Medical Imaging 2015: Computer-Aided Diagnosis, 941402 (20 March 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2076757

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9414:
Medical Imaging 2015: Computer-Aided Diagnosis
Lubomir M. Hadjiiski; Georgia D. Tourassi, Editor(s)