Automated Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Detection with Dynamic Gadolinium-Enhanced MR Imaging

C.-C. Hsu; P.-H. Lai; C. Lee; W.-C. Huang

doi:10.1055/s-0038-1634429

Methods of Information in Medicine, Table of Contents

Methods Inf Med 2001; 40(04): 331-337
DOI: 10.1055/s-0038-1634429

Original Article

Schattauer GmbH

Automated Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Detection with Dynamic Gadolinium-Enhanced MR Imaging

C.-C. Hsu

¹Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, R.O.C

⁴Yung-Ta Institute of Technology and Commerce, Pingtung, Taiwan, R.O.C

,

P.-H. Lai

²Department of Radiology, Kaohsiung Veterans General Hospital, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, R.O.C

,

C. Lee

¹Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, R.O.C

,

W.-C. Huang

³Department of Management Information Science, Chia-Nan University of Pharmacy and Science, Tainan, Taiwan, R.O.C

› Author Affiliations

Abstract

Summary

Objectives: The purpose of this research is to develop an automatic medical diagnosis for segmenting nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) with dynamic gadolinium-enhanced MR imaging.

Methods: This system is a multistage process, involving motion correction, head mask generation, dynamic MR data quantitative evaluation, rough segmentation, and rough segmentation refinement. Two approaches, a relative signal increase method and a slope method, are proposed for the quantitative evaluation of dynamic MR data.

Results: The NPC detection results obtained using the proposed methods had a rating of 85% in match percent compared with these lesions identified by an experienced radiologist. The match percent for the two proposed methods did not have significant differences. However, the computation cost for the slope method was about twelve times faster than the relative signal increase method.

Conclusions: The proposed methods can identify the NPC regions quickly and effectively. This system can enhance the performance of clinical diagnosis.

Keywords

Nasopharyngeal Neoplasms - Computer-Assisted Image Processing - Magnetic Resonance Imaging - Motion - Pharmacokinetics

Full Text

References

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