Currently, one of the most common causes of death worldwide is cancer. The development of innovative methods to support the early and accurate detection of cancers is required to increase the recovery rate of patients. Several studies have shown that medical Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) combined with artificial intelligence algorithms is a powerful tool for cancer detection. Various preprocessing methods are commonly applied to hyperspectral data to improve the performance of the algorithms. However, there is currently no standard for these methods, and no studies have compared them so far in the medical field. In this work, we evaluated different combinations of preprocessing steps, including spatial and spectral smoothing, Min-Max scaling, Standard Normal Variate normalization, and a median spatial smoothing technique, with the goal of improving tumor detection in three different HSI databases concerning colorectal, esophagogastric, and brain cancers. Two machine learning and deep learning models were used to perform the pixel-wise classification. The results showed that the choice of preprocessing method affects the performance of tumor identification. The method that showed slightly better results with respect to identifing colorectal tumors was Median Filter preprocessing (0.94 of area under the curve). On the other hand, esophagogastric and brain tumors were more accurately identified using Min-Max scaling preprocessing (0.93 and 0.92 of area under the curve, respectively). However, it is observed that the Median Filter method smooths sharp spectral features, resulting in high variability in the classification performance. Therefore, based on these results, obtained with different databases acquired by different HSI instrumentation, the most relevant preprocessing technique identified in this work is Min-Max scaling.
Keywords: brain cancer; colon cancer; deep learning; esophagogastric cancer; hyperspectral imaging; machine learning; median filter; min-max scaling; standard normal variate normalization.