Increased potential for tissue discrimination in quantitative magnetic resonance imaging

Results from a study of carcinoma and benign hypertrophy of the prostate show the potential for classification of tissues from individual patients and demonstrate increased class separation. This appears to be the first application of pattern recognition techniques to relaxation-time data from in-vivo MR images. Multiple-point relaxation-time maps were classified using both statistical measures and texture descriptors derived from spatial grey level dependency matrices. These parameters were combined in a new pattern-recognition method based upon the Karhunen-Loeve expansion. (author)