3t2FTS: A Novel Feature Transform Strategy to Classify 3D MRI Voxels and Its Application on HGG/LGG Classification

Abstract

The distinction between high-grade glioma (HGG) and low-grade glioma (LGG) is generally performed with two-dimensional (2D) image analyses that constitute semi-automated tumor classification. However, a fully automated computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) can only be realized using an adaptive classification framework based on three-dimensional (3D) segmented tumors. In this paper, we handle the classification section of a fully automated CAD related to the aforementioned requirement. For this purpose, a 3D to 2D feature transform strategy (3t2FTS) is presented operating first-order statistics (FOS) in order to form the input data by considering every phase (T1, T2, T1c, and FLAIR) of information on 3D magnetic resonance imaging (3D MRI). Herein, the main aim is the transformation of 3D data analyses into 2D data analyses so as to applicate the information to be fed to the efficient deep learning methods. In other words, 2D identification (2D-ID) of 3D voxels is produced. In our experiments, eight transfer learning models (DenseNet201, InceptionResNetV2, InceptionV3, ResNet50, ResNet101, SqueezeNet, VGG19, and Xception) were evaluated to reveal the appropriate one for the output of 3t2FTS and to design the proposed framework categorizing the 210 HGG–75 LGG instances in the BraTS 2017/2018 challenge dataset. The hyperparameters of the models were examined in a comprehensive manner to reveal the highest performance of the models to be reached. In our trails, two-fold cross-validation was considered as the test method to assess system performance. Consequently, the highest performance was observed with the framework including the 3t2FTS and ResNet50 models by achieving 80% classification accuracy for the 3D-based classification of brain tumors.