Improved window adaptive gray level co-occurrence matrix for extraction and analysis of texture characteristics of pulmonary nodules

Abstract

Background and ObjectiveIdentifying benign and malignant pulmonary nodules is essential for the early diagnosis of lung cancer and targeted surgical resection. This study aimed to differentiate benign from malignant pulmonary nodules based on computed tomography (CT) plain scan texture analysis technique. MethodsA total of 47 pulmonary nodules use the improved window adaptive gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) algorithm to extract the texture characteristics of the area of interest. The Fisher coefficient (Fisher), classification error probability joint average correlation coefficient (POE+ACC), mutual information (MI), and the combination of above three methods joint (FPM) were used to select the best texture parameters set. After that, the analysis of the screened texture parameters was adopted. The B11 module provides four analytical methods, including raw data analysis (RDA), principal component analysis (PCA), linear discriminant analysis (LDA), and nonlinear discriminant analysis (NDA). The results were expressed in the form of misclassification rate (MCR). Region of curve (ROC) analysis was also performed on the selected optimal texture parameters. ResultsThe MCR of all the three texture feature extraction methods, Fisher, POE+ACC, and MI, were lower in differentiating benign from malignant pulmonary nodules. FPM method could further reduce the MCR. The NDA analysis had the lowest MCR for both of these three feature extraction methods. The MCR can be further reduced to 2.13% by the combination of NDA and FPM. The ROC curve showed that Perc.01% parameter had the highest AUC value and the most discriminative efficacy. ConclusionThe lowest MCR values were calculated by the FPM dimensionality reduction method and the NDA analysis method. The improved GLCM algorithm has a discriminative role in CT texture analysis of benign and malignant pulmonary nodules.