Texture Feature-Based Machine Learning Classification on MRI Image for Sepsis-Associated Encephalopathy Detection: A Pilot Study

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to assess the performance of combining MRI-based texture analysis with machine learning for differentiating sepsis-associated encephalopathy (SAE) from sepsis alone. METHOD: Sixty-six MRI-T1WI images of an SAE patient and 125 images of patients with sepsis alone were collected. Frontal lobe, brain stem, hippocampus, and amygdala were selected as regions of interest (ROIs). 279 texture features of each ROI were obtained using MaZda software. After the dimension reduction, 30 highly discriminative features of each ROI were adopted to differentiate SAE from sepsis alone using the CatBoost model. RESULTS: The classification models of frontal, brain stem, hippocampus, and amygdala were constructed. The classification accuracy was above 0.83, and the area under the curve (AUC) exceeded 0.90 in the validation set. CONCLUSION: The texture features differed between SAE patients and patients with sepsis alone in different anatomical locations, suggesting that MRI-based texture analysis with machine learning might be helpful in differentiating SAE from sepsis alone.