New method for cancer screening based on decision fusion model

Abstract

Colorectal cancer has been increasingly becoming one of the major killer diseases in the world. If this type of cancer can be detected in the early stage, the rate of survival is quite high. However, generally it is detected considerably late due to a lack of accurate screening program in practice for early detection. In this paper, a novel approach based on decision fusion is presented for providing an intelligent computer-assisted clinical diagnosis to physicians for the early detection of colorectal cancer. There are three steps in the screening procedure, that is, image acquisition from endoscope, image processing, and decision-making based on fusion technique. In the second step, many effective image-processing techniques can be applied and corresponding local decisions can be made for diagnosis. These decisions are fused in a fusion model to achieve the fmal decision. The fusion algorithm takes into account the accuracy of each technique and the performance of individual technique is utilized to adjust the weights employed m the algorithm. The proposed fusion approach is trained and tested by sets of endoscopic images. The results obtained are encouraging and suggest that the new fusion approach for the cancer detection is feasible.