Lesion detection using T1-weighted MRI: A new approach based on functional cortical ROIs

摘要

Accurate and precise detection of brain lesions on MR images is important for relating lesion locations to impaired behaviors. In this paper, we propose a method to detect lesion voxels on each functional cortical ROI (Region of Interest) independently using only T1-weighted MR images (T1-MRI). In contrast to existing automatic lesion detection methods, which typically detect lesion voxels on the whole MR image or on gray matter (GM)/white matter (WM), we show that the proposed functional cortical ROI based method can lead to better lesion-detection performance. We evaluate the proposed method using an in-house dataset with 60 chronic stroke patients. Using leave-one-subject-out cross validation, the proposed method can achieve an average Dice coefficient of 0.74 ± 0.11 and outperform three state-of-the-art methods by more than 0.05.