Magnetic resonance imaging texture analysis in the quantitative evaluation of acute osteomyelitis of the mandibular bone

Objectives: Accurate assessment of radiological images can help in early diagnosis and therapy of suppurative osteomyelitis (OM). The purpose of this study was to apply texture analysis to MRI as a means of quantitatively evaluating acute OM of the mandible. Methods: We analyzed the data from 38 patients who complained of pain and underwent MRI between April 2017 and March 2019. From the MRIs of these patients, with (n = 19) and without OM (n = 19), 279 radiomics features were extracted using short tau inversion recovery, data of the regions of interest and analyzed with MaZda v. 3.3. 10 features, including one histogram feature (90th percentile), eight gray-level co-occurrence matrix features (Sum Averg), and one gray-level run-length matrix feature (Horzl_RLNonUni), were selected using Fisher coefficient and compared between the acute OM and non-OM groups. The two groups were compared using Mann-Whitney U test with p value set at 0.05. Results: All 10 radiomics features showed significant differences between the acute OM and non-OM groups (p < 0.05). Conclusions: MRI texture analysis has potential application in radiomics diagnosis of acute OM of the mandible.