Statistical feature selection for enhanced detection of brain tumor

Feature-based methods are widely used in the brain tumor recognition system. Robust of early cancer detection is one of the most powerful image processing tools. Specifically, statistical features, such as geometric mean, harmonic mean, mean excluding outliers, median, percentiles, skewness and kurtosis, have been extracted from brain tumor glioma to aid in discriminating two levels namely, Level I and Level II using fluid attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) sequence in the diagnosis of brain tumor. Statistical feature describes the major characteristics of each level from glioma which is an important step to evaluate heterogeneity of cancer area pixels. In this paper, we address the task of feature selection to identify the relevant subset of features in the statistical domain, while discarding those that are either redundant or confusing, thereby improving the performance of feature-based scheme to distinguish between Level I and Level II. We apply a Decision Structure algorithm to find the optimal combination of nonhomogeneity based statistical features for the problem at hand. We employ a Naïve Bayes classifier to evaluate the performance of the optimal statistical feature based scheme in terms of its glioma Level I and Level II discrimination capability and use real-data collected from 17 patients have a glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). Dataset provided from 3 Tesla MR imaging system by MD Anderson Cancer Center. For the specific data analyzed, it is shown that the identified dominant features yield higher classification accuracy, with lower number of false alarms and missed detections, compared to the full statistical based feature set. This work has been proposed and analyzed specific GBM types which Level I and Level II and the dominant features were considered as feature aid to prognostic indicators. These features were selected automatically to be better able to determine prognosis from classical imaging studies.