Automated colon cancer detection using hybrid of novel geometric features and some traditional features

Automatic classification of colon into normal and malignant classes is complex due to numerous factors including similar colors in different biological constituents of histopathological imagery. Therefore, such techniques, which exploit the textural and geometric properties of constituents of colon tissues, are desired. In this paper, a novel feature extraction strategy that mathematically models the geometric characteristics of constituents of colon tissues is proposed. In this study, we also show that the hybrid feature space encompassing diverse knowledge about the tissues' characteristics is quite promising for classification of colon biopsy images. This paper thus presents a hybrid feature space based colon classification (HFS-CC) technique, which utilizes hybrid features for differentiating normal and malignant colon samples. The hybrid feature space is formed to provide the classifier different types of discriminative features such as features having rich information about geometric structure and image texture. Along with the proposed geometric features, a few conventional features such as morphological, texture, scale invariant feature transform (SIFT), and elliptic Fourier descriptors (EFDs) are also used to develop a hybrid feature set. The SIFT features are reduced using minimum redundancy and maximum relevancy (mRMR). Various kernels of support vector machines (SVM) are employed as classifiers, and their performance is analyzed on 174 colon biopsy images. The proposed geometric features have achieved an accuracy of 92.62%, thereby showing their effectiveness. Moreover, the proposed HFS-CC technique achieves 98.07% testing and 99.18% training accuracy. The better performance of HFS-CC is largely due to the discerning ability of the proposed geometric features and the developed hybrid feature space. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.