Semi-automatic Crohn’s disease severity estimation on MR imaging

Abstract

Crohn’s disease (CD) is a chronic inflammatory bowel disease which can be visualized by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). For CD grading, several non-invasive MRI based severity scores are known, most prominent the MaRIA and AIS. As these scores rely on manual MRI readings for individual bowel segments by trained radiologists, automated MRI assessment has been more and more focused in recent research. We show on a dataset of 27 CD patients that semi-automatically measured bowel wall thickness (ABWT) and dynamic contrast enhancement (DCE) completely outperform manual scorings: the segmental correlation to the Crohn’s Disease Endoscopic Index of Severity (CDEIS) of ABWT and DCE is significantly higher (r =.78) than that of MaRIA (r =.45) or AIS (r =.51). Also on a per-patient basis, the models with ABWT and DCE show significantly higher correlation (r =.69) to global CDEIS than MaRIA (r =.46).