A Probabilistic Method for Estimation of Bowel Wall Thickness in MR Colonography

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 12; no. 1; p. e0168317
• Main Authors: Hampshire, Thomas, Menys, Alex, Jaffer, Asif, Bhatnagar, Gauraang, Punwani, Shonit, Atkinson, David, Halligan, Steve, Hawkes, David J., Taylor, Stuart A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 10.01.2017; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Abdomen; Adult; Algorithms; Analysis; Biology and Life Sciences; Biomarkers; Care and treatment; Crohn Disease - diagnostic imaging; Crohn Disease - pathology; Crohn's disease; Endoscopy; Female; Humans; Inflammation; International conferences; Intestine; Magnetic resonance imaging; Magnetic Resonance Imaging - methods; Male; Medical imaging; Medicine and Health Sciences; Methods; Middle Aged; Models, Statistical; Physical Sciences; Probabilistic methods; Research and Analysis Methods; Risk factors; Therapy; Thickness measurement; Variability; Wall thickness; Workflow; Young Adult
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0168317

MRI has recently been applied as a tool to quantitatively evaluate the response to therapy in patients with Crohn's disease, and is the preferred choice for repeated imaging. Bowel wall thickness on MRI is an important biomarker of underlying inflammatory activity, being abnormally increased in the acute phase and reducing in response to successful therapy; however, a poor level of interobserver agreement of measured thickness is reported and therefore a system for accurate, robust and reproducible measurements is desirable. We propose a novel method for estimating bowel wall-thickness to improve the poor interobserver agreement of the manual procedure. We show that the variability of wall thickness measurement between the algorithm and observer measurements (0.25mm ± 0.81mm) has differences which are similar to observer variability (0.16mm ± 0.64mm).