Īpplications of texture analysis in medical imaging include classification and segmentation of tissues and lesions. It has been shown that different image areas exhibit different textural patterns that are sometimes imperceptible to the human eye. Texture analysis describes a wide range of techniques for quantification of gray-level patterns and pixel inter-relationships within an image providing a measure of heterogeneity. There is not a strict definition of an image texture but it can be described as the spatial arrangement of patterns that provides the visual appearance of coarseness, randomness, smoothness, etc. In the past years, texture analysis has gained attention in medical applications and has been proved to be a significant computer-aided diagnostic tool. Ĭomputer-aided diagnostic tools assist the radiologist in the diagnosis by providing quantitative measures of morphology, function, and other biomarkers in different tissues. Texture analysis has demonstrated to be a useful tool for this purpose.

Discrimination of these different entities is crucial for patient treatment but it is visually non-feasible. T1-weighted MRI with contrast enhancement of a brain metastatic lesion (a), and a radionecrosis lesion (b). In an effort to avoid this invasive diagnostic approach, and considering that additional imaging modalities are costly and not as widely available as conventional MRI, great interest exists in identifying reliable imaging features from routine MRI scans that would help differentiate certain lesions. In these particular cases, histopathology remains the gold standard diagnostic technique. For example, the visual appearance on MRI of a metastatic brain tumor can be very similar to one of a radionecrosis lesion ( Figure 1), and a wrong diagnosis can lead to improper patient treatment. However, diagnosis of some pathologies remains difficult due to the restricted ability of the human eye to detect intrinsic, heterogeneous characteristics of certain tissues. MRI offers excellent anatomic details due to its high soft-tissue contrast and the possibility to enhance different types of tissues using different acquisition protocols. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has become a powerful diagnostic tool by providing high quality images, thanks to new advances in technology.

Clearview value metric mri