Multispectral co-occurrence with three random variables in dynamic contrast enhanced magnetic resonance imaging of breast cancer

Presented is a new computer-aided multispectral image processing method which is used in three spatial dimensions and one spectral dimension where the dynamic, contrast enhanced magnetic resonance parameter maps derived from voxel-wise model-fitting represent the spectral dimension. The method is based on co-occurrence analysis using a 3-D window of observation which introduces an automated identification of suspicious lesions. The co-occurrence analysis defines 21 different statistical features, a subset of which were input to a neural network classifier where the assessments of the voxel-wise majority of a group of radiologist readings were used as the gold standard. The voxel-wise true positive fraction (TPF) and false positive fraction (FPF) results of the computer classifier were statistically indistinguishable from the TPF and FPF results of the readers using a one sample paired g-test. In order to observe the generality of the method, two different groups of studies were used with widely different image acquisition specifications. Index Terms--Breast, dynamic, contrast enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI), multispectral image processing, neural networks, statistical co-occurrence analysis.