Desiccation detection from lumbar MR images

Desiccation is the drying out of the fluids in the lumbar intervertebral discs and it may cause many health problems. In clinical practice, MR imaging is used for diagnosis because in T2-weighted MR images the desiccated discs are darker than non-desiccated discs. In this study, we present a method for automatically detecting desiccated lumbar intervertebral discs from MR images. First, the lumbar discs are automatically localized and labeled. Then, raw intensity features are used and texture features are extracted with local binary patterns technique from the lumbar discs. The features are trained and tested by random forests. The method is tested and validated on a dataset containing 80 MR images. The classification accuracy of the method is %88.54 and results are promising.