Etiology-based classification of brain white matter hyperintensity on magnetic resonance imaging

Brain white matter lesions found upon magnetic resonance imaging are often observed in psychiatric or neurological patients. Individuals with these lesions present a more significant cognitive impairment when compared with individuals without them. We propose a computerized method to distinguish tissue containing white matter lesions of different etiologies (e.g., demyelinating or ischemic) using texture-based classifiers. Texture attributes were extracted from manually selected regions of interest and used to train and test supervised classifiers. Experiments were conducted to evaluate texture attribute discrimination and classifiers' performances. The most discriminating texture attributes were obtained from the gray-level histogram and from the co-occurrence matrix. The best classifier was the support vector machine, which achieved an accuracy of 87.9% in distinguishing lesions with different etiologies and an accuracy of 99.29% in distinguishing normal white matter from white matter lesions.