Statistical texture analysis based MRI quantification of Duchenne muscular dystrophy in a canine model

Golden retriever muscular dystrophy (GRMD) is a canine model of Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) that has been increasingly used in both pathogenetic and therapeutic pre-clinical studies. Recent studies have shown that Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has great potential to noninvasively assess muscle disorders and has been increasingly used to monitor disease progression in DMD patients and GRMD dogs. In this study, we developed a statistical texture analysis based MRI quantification framework for GRMD. Our system was applied to a database of 45 MRI scans from 8 normal and 10 GRMD dogs in a natural history study. The dogs were longitudinally scanned at 3, 6 and 9 months of age. We first segmented six proximal limb muscles of each dog using a semi-automated, interpolation-based method and then automatically measured the 3D first-order histogram and novel 3D high-order run-length matrix based texture features within each segmented muscle. Our results indicated that MRI texture features has the ability to distinguish the normal and GRMD muscles at each age. Our experimental results demonstrated the potential of MRI texture measurements to serve as biomarkers to distinguish normal and muscular dystrophic muscles in DMD patients.