Combined texture feature analysis of segmentation and classification of benign and malignant tumour CT slices

A computer software system is designed for the segmentation and classification of benign from malignant tumour slices in brain computed tomography (CT) images. This paper presents a method to find and select both the dominant run length and co-occurrence texture features of region of interest (ROI) of the tumour region of each slice to be segmented by Fuzzy c means clustering (FCM) and evaluate the performance of support vector machine (SVM)-based classifiers in classifying benign and malignant tumour slices. Two hundred and six tumour confirmed CT slices are considered in this study. A total of 17 texture features are extracted by a feature extraction procedure, and six features are selected using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). This study constructed the SVM-based classifier with the selected features and by comparing the segmentation results with the experienced radiologist labelled ground truth (target). Quantitative analysis between ground truth and segmented tumour is presented in terms of segmentation accuracy, segmentation error and overlap similarity measures such as the Jaccard index. The classification performance of the SVM-based classifier with the same selected features is also evaluated using a 10-fold cross-validation method. The proposed system provides some newly found texture features have an important contribution in classifying benign and malignant tumour slices efficiently and accurately with less computational time. The experimental results showed that the proposed system is able to achieve the highest segmentation and classification accuracy effectiveness as measured by jaccard index and sensitivity and specificity. © 2013 Informa UK, Ltd.