Kostopoulos Spiros, Boci Nada, Cavouras Dionisis, Tsagkalis Antonios, Papaioannou Maria, Tsikrika Alexandra, Glotsos Dimitris, Asvestas Pantelis, Lavdas Eleftherios
Medical Image and Signal Processing Laboratory, Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of West Attica, 12241 Athens, Greece.
Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of West Attica, 12241 Athens, Greece.
J Imaging. 2023 Nov 20;9(11):252. doi: 10.3390/jimaging9110252.
Accurate diagnosis and timely intervention are key to addressing common knee conditions effectively. In this work, we aim to identify textural changes in knee lesions based on bone marrow edema (BME), injury (INJ), and osteoarthritis (OST). One hundred and twenty-one MRI knee examinations were selected. Cases were divided into three groups based on radiological findings: forty-one in the BME, thirty-seven in the INJ, and forty-three in the OST groups. From each ROI, eighty-one radiomic descriptors were calculated, encoding texture information. The results suggested differences in the texture characteristics of regions of interest (ROIs) extracted from PD-FSE and STIR sequences. We observed that the ROIs associated with BME exhibited greater local contrast and a wider range of structural diversity compared to the ROIs corresponding to OST. When it comes to STIR sequences, the ROIs related to BME showed higher uniformity in terms of both signal intensity and the variability of local structures compared to the INJ ROIs. A combined radiomic descriptor managed to achieve a high separation ability, with AUC of 0.93 ± 0.02 in the test set. Radiomics analysis may provide a non-invasive and quantitative means to assess the spatial distribution and heterogeneity of bone marrow edema, aiding in its early detection and characterization.
准确诊断和及时干预是有效应对常见膝关节疾病的关键。在这项研究中，我们旨在基于骨髓水肿（BME）、损伤（INJ）和骨关节炎（OST）来识别膝关节病变中的纹理变化。我们选取了121例膝关节MRI检查病例。根据影像学检查结果将病例分为三组：BME组41例，INJ组37例，OST组43例。从每个感兴趣区域（ROI）计算出81个放射组学描述符，对纹理信息进行编码。结果表明，从PD-FSE和STIR序列中提取的感兴趣区域（ROI）的纹理特征存在差异。我们观察到，与OST对应的ROI相比，与BME相关的ROI表现出更大的局部对比度和更广泛的结构多样性。在STIR序列方面，与INJ的ROI相比，与BME相关的ROI在信号强度和局部结构变异性方面均表现出更高的均匀性。一个组合的放射组学描述符具有较高的区分能力，在测试集中的AUC为0.93±0.02。放射组学分析可能提供一种非侵入性的定量方法来评估骨髓水肿的空间分布和异质性，有助于其早期检测和特征描述。
