Probabilistic one class learning for automatic detection of multiple sclerosis lesions

This paper presents an automatic algorithm for the detection of multiple sclerosis lesions (MSL) from multi-sequence magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). We build a probabilistic classifier that can recognize MSL as a novel class, trained only on Normal Appearing Brain Tissues (NABT). Patch based intensity information of MRI images is used to train a classifier at the voxel level. The classifier is in turn used to compute a probability characterizing the likelihood of each voxel to be a lesion. This probability is then used to identify a lesion voxel based on simple Otsu thresholding. The proposed framework is evaluated on 16 patients and our analysis reveals that our approach is well suited for MSL detection and outperforms other benchmark approaches.