Towards automatic segmentation of MS lesions in PD/T2 MR images

Recognizing that conspicuous multiple sclerosis (MS) lesions have high intensities in both dual-echo T2 and PD-weighted MR brain images, we show that it is possible to automatically determine a thresholding mechanism to locate conspicuous lesion pixels and also to identify pixels that suffer from reduced intensity due to partial volume effects. To do so, we first transform a T2-PD feature space via a log(T2)-log(T2+PD) remapping. In the feature space, we note that each MR slice, and in fact the whole brain, is approximately transformed into a line structure. Pixels high in both T2 and PD, corresponding to candidate conspicuous lesion pixels, also fall near this line. Therefore we first preprocess images to achieve RF-correction, isolation of the brain, and rescaling of image pixels into the range 0-255. Then, following remapping to log space, we find the main linear structure in feature space using a robust estimator that discounts outliers. We first extract the larger conspicuous lesions which do not show partial volume effects by performing a second robust regression for 1D distances along the line. The robust estimator concomitantly produces a threshold for outliers, which we identify with conspicuous lesion pixels in the high region. Finally, we perform a third regression on the conspicuous lesion pixels alone, producing a 2D conspicuous lesion line and confidence interval band. This band can be projected back into the adjacent, non-conspicuous, region to identify tissue pixels which have been subjected to the partial volume effect.