Abstract
The blurred gray/white matter junction is an important feature of focal cortical dysplasia (FCD) lesions. FCD is the main cause of epilepsy and can be detected through magnetic resonance (MR) imaging. Several earlier studies have focused on computing the gradient magnitude of the MR image and used the resulting map to model the blurred gray/white matter junction. However, gradient magnitude cannot quantify the blurred gray/white matter junction. Therefore, we proposed a novel algorithm called local directional probability optimization (LDPO) for detecting and quantifying the width of the gray/white matter boundary (GWB) within the lesional areas. The proposed LDPO method mainly consists of the following three stages: (1) introduction of a hidden Markov random field-expectation-maximization algorithm to compute the probability images of brain tissues in order to obtain the GWB region; (2) generation of local directions from gray matter (GM) to white matter (WM) passing through the GWB, considering the GWB to be an electric potential field; (3) determination of the optimal local directions for any given voxel of GWB, based on iterative searching of the neighborhood. This was then used to measure the width of the GWB. The proposed LDPO method was tested on real MR images of patients with FCD lesions. The results indicated that the LDPO method could quantify the GWB width. On the GWB width map, the width of the blurred GWB in the lesional region was observed to be greater than that in the non-lesional regions. The proposed GWB width map produced higher F-scores in terms of detecting the blurred GWB within the FCD lesional region as compared to that of FCD feature maps, indicating better trade-off between precision and recall.
Highlights
The blurred gray/white matter junction in T1-weighted magnetic resonance (MR) image is an important characteristic of focal cortical dysplasia (FCD) (Bernasconi et al, 2001; Antel et al, 2002, 2003; Bernasconi and Bernasconi, 2011)
We proposed local directional probability optimization (LDPO) as a new method to quantify the gray/white matter junction by measuring the gray/white matter boundary (GWB)-width
FCD lesions were delineated by the neuroradiologist using active contour segmentation of the ITK-SNAP1 tool (Yushkevich et al, 2006) on the axial views of the T1-weighted with the auxiliary information of fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) MR images
Summary
The blurred gray/white matter junction in T1-weighted magnetic resonance (MR) image is an important characteristic of focal cortical dysplasia (FCD) (Bernasconi et al, 2001; Antel et al, 2002, 2003; Bernasconi and Bernasconi, 2011). FCD is a localized malformation of brain cortical development and is the main cause of epilepsy in 30% of the patients (Bernasconi and Bernasconi, 2011). MR imaging is a non-invasive imaging technique and is the most important tool in the pre-surgical evaluation of FCD lesions. The detection of FCD lesions on MR image depends on the feature analysis of the lesions; computing and analyzing features of the lesions using MR images are important for diagnosing and treating FCD lesions
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