Parametrization of textural patterns in 123I-ioflupane imaging for the automatic detection of Parkinsonism.

PURPOSE A novel approach to a computer aided diagnosis system for the Parkinson's disease is proposed. This tool is intended as a supporting tool for physicians, based on fully automated methods that lead to the classification of (123)I-ioflupane SPECT images. METHODS (123)I-ioflupane images from three different databases are used to train the system. The images are intensity and spatially normalized, then subimages are extracted and a 3D gray-level co-occurrence matrix is computed over these subimages, allowing the characterization of the texture using Haralick texture features. Finally, different discrimination estimation methods are used to select a feature vector that can be used to train and test the classifier. RESULTS Using the leave-one-out cross-validation technique over these three databases, the system achieves results up to a 97.4% of accuracy, and 99.1% of sensitivity, with positive likelihood ratios over 27. CONCLUSIONS The system presents a robust feature extraction method that helps physicians in the diagnosis task by providing objective, operator-independent textural information about (123)I-ioflupane images, commonly used in the diagnosis of the Parkinson's disease. Textural features computation has been optimized by using a subimage selection algorithm, and the discrimination estimation methods used here makes the system feature-independent, allowing us to extend it to other databases and diseases.