Abstract
Objectives: The objective of this study was to develop a computer-aided detection system for automated brain metastases detection using magnetic resonance black-blood imaging and compare its applicability with conventional magnetization-prepared rapid gradient echo (MP-RAGE) imaging. Materials and Methods: Twenty-six patients with brain metastases were imaged with a contrast-enhanced, 3-dimensional, whole-brain magnetic resonance black-blood pulse sequence. Approval from the institutional review board and informed consent from the patients were obtained. Preprocessing steps included B1 inhomogeneity correction and brain extraction. The computer-aided detection system used 3-dimensional template matching, which measured normalized cross-correlation coefficient to generate possible metastases candidates. An artificial neural network was used for classification after various volume features were extracted. The same detection procedure was tested with contrast-enhanced MP-RAGE, which was also acquired from the same patients. Results: The performance of the proposed detection method was measured by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC), sensitivity, and specificity values. In the black-blood case, detection process displayed an AUROC of 0.9355, a sensitivity value of 81.1%, and a specificity value of 98.2%. Magnetization-prepared rapid gradient echo data showed an AUROC of 0.6508, a sensitivity value of 30.2%, and a specificity value of 99.97%. Conclusions: The results demonstrate that accurate automated detection of metastatic brain tumors using contrast-enhanced black-blood imaging sequence is possible compared with using conventional contrast-enhanced MP-RAGE sequence.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 113-119 |
Number of pages | 7 |
Journal | Investigative radiology |
Volume | 48 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2013 Feb |
Keywords
- MP-RAGE
- artificial neural network
- black-blood imaging
- brain metastases
- computer-aided detection
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Radiology Nuclear Medicine and imaging