Automatic Irregular Texture Detection in Brain MRI Without Human Supervision

摘要

We propose a novel approach named one-time sampling irregularity age map (OTS-IAM) to detect any irregular texture in FLAIR brain MRI without any human supervision or interaction. In this study, we show that OTS-IAM is able to detect FLAIR's brain tissue irregularities (i.e. hyperintensities) without any manual labelling. Onetime sampling (OTS) scheme is proposed in this study to speed up the computation. The proposed OTS-IAM implementation on GPU successfully speeds up IAM's computation by more than 17 times. We compared the performance of OTS-IAM with two unsupervised methods for hyperintensities' detection; the original IAM and the Lesion Growth Algorithm from public toolbox Lesion Segmentation Toolbox (LST-LGA), and two conventional supervised machine learning algorithms; support vector machine (SVM) and random forest (RF). Furthermore, we also compared OTS-IAM's performance with three supervised deep neural networks algorithms; Deep Boltzmann machine (DBM), convolutional encoder network (CEN) and 2D convolutional neural network (2D Patch-CNN). Based on our experiments, OTS-IAM outperformed LST-LGA, SVM, RF and DBM while it was on par with CEN.