Convolutional-Neural-Network Assisted Segmentation and SVM Classification of Brain Tumor in Clinical MRI Slices

Abstract

Due to the increased disease occurrence rates in humans, the need for the Automated Disease Diagnosis (ADD) systems is also raised. Most of the ADD systems are proposed to support the doctor during the screening and decision making process. This research aims at developing a Computer Aided Disease Diagnosis (CADD) scheme to categorize the brain tumour of 2D MRI slices into Glioblastoma/Glioma class with better accuracy. The main contribution of this research work is to develop a CADD system with Convolutional-Neural-Network (CNN) supported segmentation and classification. The proposed CADD framework consist of the following phases; (i) Image collection and resizing, (ii) Automated tumour segmentation using VGG-UNet, (iv) Deep-feature extraction using VGG16 network, (v) Handcrafted feature extraction, (vi) Finest feature choice by firefly-algorithm, and (vii) Serial feature concatenation and binary classification. The merit of the executed CADD is confirmed using an investigation realized using the benchmark as well as clinically collected brain MRI slices. In this work, a binary classification with a 10-fold cross validation is implemented using well known classifiers and the results attained with the SVM-Cubic (accuracy >98%) is superior. This result confirms that the combination of CNN assisted segmentation and classification helps to achieve enhanced disease detection accuracy.