title: Quantitative combination of volumetric MR imaging and MR spectroscopy data for the discrimination of meningiomas from metastatic brain tumors by means of pattern recognition.
abstract: The analysis of information derived from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and spectroscopy (MRS) has been identified as an important indicator for discriminating among different brain pathologies. The purpose of this study was to investigate the efficiency of the combination of textural MRI features and MRS metabolite ratios by means of a pattern recognition system in the task of discriminating between meningiomas and metastatic brain tumors. The data set consisted of 40 brain MR image series and their corresponding spectral data obtained from patients with verified tumors. The pattern recognition system was designed employing the support vector machines classifier with radial basis function kernel; the system was evaluated using an external cross validation process to render results indicative of the generalization performance to "unknown" cases. The combination of MR textural and spectroscopic features resulted in 92.15% overall accuracy in discriminating meningiomas from metastatic brain tumors. The fusion of the information derived from MRI and MRS data might be helpful in providing clinicians a useful second opinion tool for accurate characterization of brain tumors.
authors.affiliation: Medical Image Processing and Analysis (MIPA) Group, Laboratory of Medical Physics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Patras, GR-26503 Rio, Greece. pgeorgiadis@med.upatras.gr
authors.forename: Pantelis
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Georgiadis
authors.forename: Spiros
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kostopoulos
authors.forename: Dionisis
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Cavouras
authors.forename: Dimitris
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Glotsos
authors.forename: Ioannis
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Kalatzis
authors.forename: Koralia
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Sifaki
authors.forename: Menelaos
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Malamas
authors.forename: Ekaterini
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Solomou
authors.forename: George
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Nikiforidis
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D001932:Brain Neoplasms / Q000473:pathology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods*; D009682:Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy / Q000379:methods*; D008297:Male; D008579:Meningioma / Q000378:metabolism; D008875:Middle Aged; D009362:Neoplasm Metastasis; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated / Q000379:methods; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013053:Spectrophotometry / Q000379:methods