Computer-aided diagnosis system for tissue characterization of brain tumor on magnetic resonance images

Abstract

The manual analysis of brain tumor on magnetic resonance (MR) images is time-consuming and subjective. Thus, to avoid human errors in brain tumor diagnosis, this paper presents an automatic and accurate computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system based on ensemble classifier for the characterization of brain tumors on MR images as benign or malignant. Brain tumor tissue was automatically extracted from MR images by the proposed segmentation technique. A tumor is represented by extracting its texture, shape, and boundary features. The most significant features are selected by using information gain-based feature ranking and independent component analysis techniques. Next, these features are used to train the ensemble classifier consisting of support vector machine, artificial neural network, and k-nearest neighbor classifiers to characterize the tumor. Experiments were carried out on a dataset consisting of T1-weighted post-contrast and T2-weighted MR images of 550 patients. The developed CAD system was tested using the leave-one-out method. The experimental results showed that the proposed segmentation technique achieves good agreement with the gold standard and the ensemble classifier is highly effective in the diagnosis of brain tumor with an accuracy of 99.09 % (sensitivity 100 % and specificity 98.21 %). Thus, the proposed system can assist radiologists in an accurate diagnosis of brain tumors. © 2013, Springer-Verlag London.