An Exploratory Study to Detect Meniere's Disease in Conventional MRI Scans Using Radiomics

Objective: The purpose of this exploratory study was to investigate whether a quantitative image analysis of the labyrinth in conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans using a radiomics approach showed differences between patients with Meniere's disease (MD) and the control group. Materials and methods: In this retrospective study, MRI scans of the affected labyrinths of 24 patients with MD were compared to the MRI scans of labyrinths of 29 patients with an idiopathic asymmetrical sensorineural hearing loss. The 1.5- and 3-T MRI scans had been previously made in a clinical setting between 2008 and 2015. 3D Slicer 4.4 was used to extract several substructures of the labyrinth. A quantitative analysis of the normalized radiomic image features was performed in Mathematica 10. The image features of the two groups were statistically compared. Results: For numerous image features, there was a statistically significant difference (p-value