Extended Discounting Scheme for Evidential Reasoning as Applied to MS Lesion Detection

This paper extends a conventional discounting scheme commonly used with the Dempster-Shafer evidential reasoning to deal with conflict. The extended discounting scheme is able to augment, discount, and oppose existing evidence structures when discounting factors take values in different ranges. To show its effectiveness, the scheme is employed for detecting multiple sclerosis (MS) lesions based on multi-modality MR images. The approach is fully automated and unsupervised. Experimental results have demonstrated that in addition to the superior segmentation accuracies of brain tissues, good MS detection performances have been obtained (MS detection accuracy 90.28%, similarity index 84.19%, and sensitivity 78.68% on average).