Evaluation of band generation process for classification of cerebrospinal fluid in magnetic resonance images

Cross section area (CSA) of spinal canal has been an important indicator for lumbar spinal stenosis (LSS), which remains the leading preoperative diagnosis for adults older than 65 years. Until recently, the machine learning algorithms had been investigated in [5-7] for an automatic classification system. The automatic classification system exploited the luminance of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) as the major features. Unfortunately, the limited sequences of magnetic resonance images, which included only T
₁
and T
₂
sequences, produced certain level of false alarm and reduced the classification rate. The band expansion process(BEP) proposed in [8] shed light on this issue by generating additional bands with non-linear functions. The idea of BEP unveils the non-linear relationship among sequences to increase the classification rate. The utilities of BEP had been evaluated in brain MR images [9]. This paper would like to extend the applications of BEP for classification of CSF. The experimental studies further demonstrated the benefits of the BEP.