An Automated and Intelligent Medical Decision Support System for Brain MRI Scans Classification

PLoS One. 2015 Aug 17;10(8):e0135875. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0135875. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

A wide interest has been observed in the medical health care applications that interpret neuroimaging scans by machine learning systems. This research proposes an intelligent, automatic, accurate, and robust classification technique to classify the human brain magnetic resonance image (MRI) as normal or abnormal, to cater down the human error during identifying the diseases in brain MRIs. In this study, fast discrete wavelet transform (DWT), principal component analysis (PCA), and least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM) are used as basic components. Firstly, fast DWT is employed to extract the salient features of brain MRI, followed by PCA, which reduces the dimensions of the features. These reduced feature vectors also shrink the memory storage consumption by 99.5%. At last, an advanced classification technique based on LS-SVM is applied to brain MR image classification using reduced features. For improving the efficiency, LS-SVM is used with non-linear radial basis function (RBF) kernel. The proposed algorithm intelligently determines the optimized values of the hyper-parameters of the RBF kernel and also applied k-fold stratified cross validation to enhance the generalization of the system. The method was tested by 340 patients' benchmark datasets of T1-weighted and T2-weighted scans. From the analysis of experimental results and performance comparisons, it is observed that the proposed medical decision support system outperformed all other modern classifiers and achieves 100% accuracy rate (specificity/sensitivity 100%/100%). Furthermore, in terms of computation time, the proposed technique is significantly faster than the recent well-known methods, and it improves the efficiency by 71%, 3%, and 4% on feature extraction stage, feature reduction stage, and classification stage, respectively. These results indicate that the proposed well-trained machine learning system has the potential to make accurate predictions about brain abnormalities from the individual subjects, therefore, it can be used as a significant tool in clinical practice.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Aged
  • Aged, 80 and over
  • Algorithms
  • Brain / pathology*
  • Expert Systems / instrumentation*
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Intelligence
  • Least-Squares Analysis
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging / instrumentation
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging / methods
  • Male
  • Middle Aged
  • Principal Component Analysis / methods
  • Sensitivity and Specificity
  • Software
  • Support Vector Machine

Grants and funding

This research work is supported by the University of Malaya Research Grant (UMRG) scheme (RG286-14AFR). The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.