Computational NeuroscienceBOOST: A supervised approach for multiple sclerosis lesion segmentation

•We present an expert system for multiple sclerosis lesion segmentation.•A boosting classifier allows determining the most discriminative features.•Extensive tests demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.•Prior knowledge and contextual features aid to improve the results.

BackgroundAutomatic multiple sclerosis lesion segmentation is a challenging task. An extensive analysis of the most recent techniques indicates an improvement of the results obtained when using prior knowledge and contextual information.New methodWe present BOOST, a knowledge-based approach to automatically segment multiple sclerosis lesions through a voxel by voxel classification. We used the Gentleboost classifier and a set of features, including contextual features, registered atlas probability maps and an outlier map.ResultsResults are computed on a set of 45 cases from three different hospitals (15 of each), obtaining a moderate agreement between the manual annotations and the automatically segmented results.Comparison with existing method(s)We quantitatively compared our results with three public state-of-the-art approaches obtaining competitive results and a better overlap with manual annotations. Our approach tends to better segment those cases with high lesion load, while cases with small lesion load are more difficult to accurately segment.ConclusionsWe believe BOOST has potential applicability in the clinical practice, although it should be improved in those cases with small lesion load.