HS–GS: A Method for Multicenter MR Image Standardization

Abstract

The access to and sharing of medical image data is essential to accelerate the research progress of complex diseases and sudden disease outbreaks. Multicenter image data is collected from different medical institutions, and the contrast and brightness of the images are significantly different, making it difficult to use the images directly. Herein, we introduce a standardized method based on magnetic resonance imaging, referred to as Histogram specification-grid search (HS-GS), which is mainly used to eliminate differences in image contrast and brightness. A Gaussian probability density function with adjustable parameters is used to generate the cumulative distribution function, and the transfer function required for the HS mapping is constructed to obtain standardized image sets based on the controllable parameters. The image sets are used to perform the GS task of radiomics classification to find the optimal controllable parameter combination and classification results, and then obtain the optimal standardized image sets. We used HS-GS to test and verify the predictive ability of the standardized mixed image sets for glioma grading, and compared it with existing methods. The experiments indicate that the standardized image sets generated by the HS-GS algorithm retain excellent stability after mixing and also show excellent classification performance. This novel image set standardization technique has proven to be a promising solution for integration into medical expert systems.

Keywords

• Data standardization
• histogram specification
• grid search
• MRI
• radiomics