Wavelet statistical texture features-based segmentation and classification of brain computed tomography images

A computer software system is designed for segmentation and classification of benign and malignant tumour slices in brain computed tomography images. In this study, the authors present a method to select both dominant run length and co-occurrence texture features of wavelet approximation tumour region of each slice to be segmented by a support vector machine (SVM). Two-dimensional discrete wavelet decomposition is performed on the tumour image to remove the noise. The images considered for this study belong to 208 tumour slices. Seventeen features are extracted and six features are selected using Student´s t-test. This study constructed the SVM and probabilistic neural network (PNN) classifiers with the selected features. The classification accuracy of both classifiers are evaluated using the k fold cross validation method. The segmentation results are also compared with the experienced radiologist ground truth. Quantitative analysis between ground truth and the segmented tumour is presented in terms of segmentation accuracy and segmentation error. The proposed system provides some newly found texture features have an important contribution in classifying tumour slices efficiently and accurately. The experimental results show that the proposed SVM classifier is able to achieve high segmentation and classification accuracy effectiveness as measured by sensitivity and specificity.