3D texture-based classification applied on brain white matter lesions on MR images

Lesions in the brain white matter are among the most frequently observed incidental findings on MR images. This paper presents a 3D texture-based classification to distinguish normal appearing white matter from white matter containing lesions, and compares it with the 2D approach. Texture analysis were based on 55 texture attributes extracted from gray-level histogram, gray-level co-occurrence matrix, run-length matrix and gradient. The results show that the 3D approach achieves an accuracy rate of 99.28%, against 97.41% of the 2D approach by using a support vector machine classifier. Furthermore, the most discriminating texture attributes on both 2D and 3D cases were obtained from the image histogram and co-occurrence matrix.