Necroinflammatory Activity Grade

Purpose To assess the feasibility of texture analysis for classifying fibrosis stage and necroinflamma-tory activity grade in patients with chronic hepatitis C on T2-weighted (T2W), T1-weighted (T1W) and Gd-EOB-DTPA-enhanced hepatocyte-phase (EOB-HP) imaging. Materials and methods From April 2008 to June 2012, MR images from 123 patients with pathologically proven chronic hepatitis C were retrospectively analyzed. Texture parameters derived from histo-gram, gradient, run-length matrix, co-occurrence matrix, autoregressive model and wavelet transform methods were estimated with imaging software. Fisher, probability of classifica-tion error and average correlation, and mutual information coefficients were used to extract subsets of optimized texture features. Linear discriminant analysis in combination with 1-nearest neighbor classifier (LDA/1-NN) was used for lesion classification. In compliance with the software requirement, classification was performed based on datasets from all pa-tients, the patient group with necroinflammatory activity grade 1, and that with fibrosis stag