Unsupervised tissue segmentation from dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging

ObjectiveDesign, implement, and validate an unsupervised method for tissue segmentation from dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI).MethodsFor each DCE-MRI acquisition, after a spatial registration phase, the time-varying intensity of each voxel is represented as a sparse linear combination of adaptive basis signals. Both the basis signals and the sparse coefficients are learned by minimizing a functional consisting of a data fidelity term and a sparsity inducing penalty. Tissue segmentation is then obtained by applying a standard clustering algorithm to the computed representation.ResultsQuantitative estimates on two real data sets are presented. In the first case, the overlap with expert annotation measured with the DICE metric is nearly 90% and thus 5% more accurate than state-of-the-art techniques. In the second case, assessment of the correlation between quantitative scores, obtained by the proposed method against imagery manually annotated by two experts, achieved a Pearson coefficient of 0.83 and 0.87, and a Spearman coefficient of 0.83 and 0.71, respectively.ConclusionsThe sparse representation of DCE MRI signals obtained by means of adaptive dictionary learning techniques appears to be well-suited for unsupervised tissue segmentation and applicable to different clinical contexts with little effort.