Breast MRI data analysis by LLE

Locally linear embedding (LLE) has recently been proposed as a powerful algorithm for unsupervised learning and dimensional data reduction. For a first time we apply LLE to a problem of medical data analysis. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is considered as an essential imaging modality in the detection and classification of breast cancer. In dynamic contrast enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI) the data set of each patient is composed of a sequence of images and each data point in the image is associated with one time-series feature vector. Our results show that LLE is capable of revealing the heterogeneity of malignant tumors from the data structure of DCE-MRI signals.