CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATION

This application claims priority of Taiwanese Patent Application No. 106108922, filed on Mar. 17, 2017, which is hereby incorporated by reference herein in its entirety.

FIELD

The disclosure relates to a method for diagnosing a neurological disorder, and more particularly to a method for diagnosing a neurological disorder by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

BACKGROUND

For the sake of minimizing the body burden of a radioactive tracer in an examinee, and for the sake of achieving relatively high spatial resolution and contrast in imaging, the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique has been widely used, but mostly for the ruling out of concomitant neurological disorder. A conventional approach of diagnosing a neurological disorder by diffusion MRI usually includes a step of selecting manually a volume of interest (VOI) in an MRI brain image of the examinee or a step of performing voxel-wise analysis on the MRI brain image.

However, manual selection of a VOI in an MRI brain image requires a higher level of expertise and might sometimes lead to misjudgment due to practitioner's personal subjectivity. Voxel-wise analysis does not parcel the MRI brain image based on structural features of a brain, so regional characteristics of the brain might be neglected. In addition, an excessive amount of voxels generated by voxel-wise analysis might increase difficulty of statistical explanation.

SUMMARY

Therefore, an object of the disclosure is to provide a method that is adapted for diagnosing a neurological disorder based on at least one magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) image which is associated with a brain examined and that can alleviate at least one of the drawbacks of the prior art.

According to the disclosure, the method is to be implemented by a computing device. The method includes steps of:

a) identifying, according to said at least one MRI image, a plurality of brain image regions each of which contains a respective portion of diffusion index values of at least one diffusion index, which results from image processing performed on said at least one MRI image;

b) for each of the brain image regions, calculating at least one characteristic parameter based on the respective portion of the diffusion index values of said at least one diffusion index; and

c) diagnosing the brain examined with one of predetermined categories of the neurological disorder by performing classification on a combination of the characteristic parameters of the brain image regions via a classifier associated with the predetermined categories of the neurological disorder.

