CRF-Based Clustering of Pharmacokinetic Curves from Dynamic Contrast-Enhanced MR Images

Traditionally, analysis of Dynamic Contrast-Enhanced Magnetic Resonance Images (DCE MRI) requires pharmacokinetic modelling to derive quantitative physiological parameters of the tissue. Modelling, however, is a complex task and many competing models of contrast agent kinetics and tissue structure were proposed. Alternatively, raw DCE data could be analysed to find correlation with pathology in the tissue or other desired effects, for example by clustering. In this paper, we propose a new method for DCE MRI timeseries clustering. We model the data space as a Conditional Random Field (CRF) and optimize the objective function in order to find cluster labels for all timeseries. The method is unsupervised and fully automatic. We also propose a strategy to speed up the clustering process using Support Vector Machines. We demonstrate the utility of our method on two distinct problems: prostate cancer localization and healthy kidney compartment segmentation.