Texture analysis of multiple sclerosis: a comparative study

The difficulty of using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to support early diagnosis of multiple sclerosis (MS) stems from the subtle pathological changes in the central nervous system (CNS). In this study, texture analysis was performed on MR images of MS patients and normal controls and a combined set of texture features were explored in order to better discriminate tissues between MS lesions, normal appearing white matter (NAWM) and normal white matter (NWM). Features were extracted from gradient matrix, run-length (RL) matrix, gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM), autoregressive (AR) model and wavelet analysis, and were selected based on greatest difference between different tissue types. The results of the combined set of texture features were compared with our previous results of GLCM-based features alone. The results of this study demonstrated that (1) with the combined set of texture features, classification was perfect (100%) between MS lesions and NAWM (or NWM), less successful (88.89%) among the three tissue types and worst (58.33%) between NAWM and NWM; (2) compared with GLCM-based features, the combined set of texture features were better at discriminating MS lesions and NWM, equally good at discriminating MS lesions and NAWM and at all three tissue types, but less effective in classification between NAWM and NWM. This study suggested that texture analysis with the combined set of texture features may be equally good or more advantageous than the commonly used GLCM-based features alone in discriminating MS lesions and NWM/NAWM and in supporting early diagnosis of MS.