Contextual and visual modeling for detection of mild traumatic brain injury in MRI

Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) is difficult to detect as the current tools are qualitative, which can lead to poor diagnosis and treatment. The low contrast appearance of mTBI abnormalities on magnetic resonance (MR) images makes quantification problematic for image processing and analysis techniques. To overcome these difficulties, an algorithm is proposed that takes advantage of subject information and texture information from MR images. A contextual model is developed to simulate the progression of the disease using multiple inputs, such as the time post-injury and the location of injury. Textural features are used along with feature selection for a single MR modality. Results from a probabilistic support vector machine using textural features are fused with the contextual model to obtain a robust estimation of abnormal tissue. A novel rat temporal dataset demonstrates the ability of our approach to outperform other state of the art approaches.