MRSI data unmixing using spatial and spectral priors in transformed domains

In high-grade gliomas, the tumor boundaries and the degree of infiltration are difficult to define due to their heterogeneous composition and diffuse growth pattern. Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopic Imaging (MRSI) is a non-invasive technique able to provide information on brain tumor biology not available from conventional anatomical imaging. In this paper we propose a blind source separation (BSS) algorithm for brain tissue classification and visualization of tumor spread using MRSI data. The proposed algorithm imposes relaxed non-negativity in the direct domain along with spatial-spectral regularizations in a transformed domain. The optimization problem is efficiently solved in a two-step approach using the concept of proximity operators. Vertex component analysis (VCA) is proposed to estimate the number of sources. Comparisons with state-of-the-art BSS algorithms on in-vivo MRSI data show the efficiency of the proposed algorithm. The presented method provides patterns that can easily be related to a specific tissue (normal, tumor, necrosis, hypoxia, edema or infiltration). Unlike other BSS methods dedicated to MRSI data, it can handle spectra with negative peaks and results are not sensitive to the initialization strategy. In addition, it is robust against noisy or bad-quality spectra.