Detection of suspicious lesions in dynamic contrast enhanced MRI data

Abstract

Dynamic contrast-enhanced magnet resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) has become an important source of information to aid breast cancer diagnosis. Nevertheless, next to the temporal sequence of 3D volume data from the DCE-MRI technique, the radiologist commonly adducts information from other modalities for his final diagnosis. Thus, the diagnosis process is time consuming and tools are required to support the human expert. We investigate an automatic approach that detects the location and delineates the extent of suspicious masses in multi-temporal DCE-MRI data sets. It applies the state-of-the-art support vector machine algorithm to the classification of the short-time series associated with each voxel. The ROC analysis shows an increased specificity in contrast to standard evaluations techniques.