A novel extended Kalman filter with support vector machine based method for the automatic diagnosis and segmentation of brain tumors

Background: Brain tumors are life-threatening, and their early detection is crucial for improving survival rates. Conventionally, brain tumors are detected by radiologists based on their clinical experience. However, this process is inefficient. This paper proposes a machine learning-based method to 1) determine the presence of a tumor, 2) automatically segment the tumor, and 3) classify it as benign or malignant. Methods: We implemented an Extended Kalman Filter with Support Vector Machine (EKF-SVM), an image analysis platform based on an SVM for automated brain tumor detection. A development dataset of 120 patients which supported by Tiantan Hospital was used for algorithm training. Our machine learning algorithm has 5 components as follows. Firstly, image standardization is applied to all the images. This is followed by noise removal with a non-local means filter, and contrast enhancement with improved dynamic histogram equalization. Secondly, a gray-level co-occurrence matrix is utilized for feature extraction to get the image features. Thirdly, the extracted features are fed into a SVM for classify the MRI initially, and an EKF is used to classify brain tumors in the brain MRIs. Fourthly, cross-validation is used to verify the accuracy of the classifier. Finally, an automatic segmentation method based on the combination of k-means clustering and region growth is used for detecting brain tumors. Results: With regard to the diagnostic performance, the EKF-SVM had a 96.05% accuracy for automatically classifying brain tumors. Segmentation based on k-means clustering was capable of identifying the tumor boundaries and extracting the whole tumor. Conclusion: The proposed EKF-SVM based method has better classification performance for positive brain tumor images, which was mainly due to the dearth of negative examples in our dataset. Therefore, future work should obtain more negative examples and investigate the performance of deep learning algorithms such as the convolutional neural networks for automatic diagnosis and segmentation of brain tumors. (c) 2020 Published by Elsevier B.V.

Automated summary

The proposed machine learning-based method in this paper demonstrates high accuracy in automatically detecting, segmenting, and classifying brain tumors, with a 96.05% accuracy for automatically classifying brain tumors. Further studies should focus on obtaining more negative examples and exploring the performance of deep learning algorithms for automatic diagnosis and segmentation of brain tumors.