A Texture Analysis Approach to Quantify Ventilation Changes in Hyperpolarised 3He MRI of the Rat Lung in an Asthma Model

Frank Risse¹, Jelena Pesic¹, Simon Young², Lars E. Olsson¹

The effect of steroid (budesonide) treatment on lung inflammation in rats caused by ovalbumin can be visualised using hyperpolarised ³He MRI. The aim was to quantify the changes in lung ventilation in this asthma model using texture analysis. Four groups were investigated: controls, vehicle-treated, low and high dose budesonide-treated. First-order texture, geometrical features and features based on second-order statistics using run-length and grey-level co-occurrence matrices were calculated. Additionally, wavelet transforms were applied to compute first-order statistics on multiple scales. The texture analysis showed significant differences between the untreated and the budesonide-treated groups, which was in agreement with a biological marker.