Multiple sclerosis lesion segmentation using dictionary learning and sparse coding.

The segmentation of lesions in the brain during the development of Multiple Sclerosis is part of the diagnostic assessment for this disease and gives information on its current severity. This laborious process is still carried out in a manual or semiautomatic fashion by clinicians because published automatic approaches have not been universal enough to be widely employed in clinical practice. Thus Multiple Sclerosis lesion segmentation remains an open problem. In this paper we present a new unsupervised approach addressing this problem with dictionary learning and sparse coding methods. We show its general applicability to the problem of lesion segmentation by evaluating our approach on synthetic and clinical image data and comparing it to state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore the potential of using dictionary learning and sparse coding for such segmentation tasks is investigated and various possibilities for further experiments are discussed.