An ensemble learning approach for brain cancer detection exploiting radiomic features

Abstract

Background and objective: The brain cancer is one of the most aggressive tumour: the 70% of the patients diagnosed with this malignant cancer will not survive. Early detection of brain tumours can be fundamental to increase survival rates. The brain cancers are classified into four different grades (i.e., I, II, III and IV) according to how normal or abnormal the brain cells look. The following work aims to recognize the different brain cancer grades by analysing brain magnetic resonance images.

Methods: A method to identify the components of an ensemble learner is proposed. The ensemble learner is focused on the discrimination between different brain cancer grades using non invasive radiomic features. The considered radiomic features are belonging to five different groups: First Order, Shape, Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix, Gray Level Run Length Matrix and Gray Level Size Zone Matrix. We evaluate the features effectiveness through hypothesis testing and through decision boundaries, performance analysis and calibration plots thus we select the best candidate classifiers for the ensemble learner.

Results: We evaluate the proposed method with 111,205 brain magnetic resonances belonging to two freely available data-sets for research purposes. The results are encouraging: we obtain an accuracy of 99% for the benign grade I and the II, III and IV malignant brain cancer detection.

Conclusion: The experimental results confirm that the ensemble learner designed with the proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art approaches in brain cancer grade detection starting from magnetic resonance images.

Keywords: Astrocytoma; Brain cancer; Ensemble learning; Glioblastoma; Machine learning; Radiomics.