Computer Aided Interpretation of Fibrous Texture in Hepatic Magnetic Resonance Images

Abstract

The fibrous texture in liver is one of important signs for interpreting the chronic liver diseases in radiologists’ routines. In order to investigate the usefulness of various texture features calculated by computer algorithm on hepatic magnetic resonance (MR) images, 15 texture features were calculated from the gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) within a region of interest (ROI) which was selected from the MR images with 6 stages of hepatic fibrosis. By different combination of 15 features as input vectors, the classifier had different performance in staging the hepatic fibrosis. Each combination of texture features was tested by Support Vector Machine (SVM) with leave one case out method. 173 patients’ MR images including 6 stages of hepatic fibrosis were scanned within recent two years. The result showed that optimal number of features was confirmed from 3 to 7 by investigating the classified accuracy rate between each stage/group. It is evident that angular second moment, entropy, sum average and sum entropy played the most significant role in classification.