Boosting diagnosis accuracy of Alzheimer's disease using statistical and kernel-based feature selection techniques

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common type of dementia in the elderly. Approximately, 26 million people worldwide are affected by AD. Among the various diagnostic methods for Alzheimer's disease, MRI brain imaging can display sharp changes in brain tissues. It can be used as a method for early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. Considering the high volume of features related to brain tissue thickness, requires the using feature reduction methods. For this purpose, statistical tests pair sample test and Independent sample test was used. After careful selection of key features, for reducing the number of features, SAS which is a kernel-based feature selection algorithm is used in linear and nonlinear mode. At the end, neural network classification, decision trees, nearest neighbor and Naïve Bayes algorithms are used for modeling. Results show that the classification accuracy of obtained feature subsets have better results compare to the original data set

Spatial based Expectation Maximizing (EM)

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Expectation maximizing (EM) is one of the common approaches for image segmentation.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>an improvement of the EM algorithm is proposed and its effectiveness for MRI brain image segmentation is investigated. In order to improve EM performance, the proposed algorithms incorporates neighbourhood information into the clustering process. At first, average image is obtained as neighbourhood information and then it is incorporated in clustering process. Also, as an option, user-interaction is used to improve segmentation results. Simulated and real MR volumes are used to compare the efficiency of the proposed improvement with the existing neighbourhood based extension for EM and FCM.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>the findings show that the proposed algorithm produces higher similarity index.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in compare to other existing algorithms on various noise levels.</p

Automatic segmentation of meningioma from non-contrasted brain MRI integrating fuzzy clustering and region growing

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>In recent years, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has become important in brain tumor diagnosis. Using this modality, physicians can locate specific pathologies by analyzing differences in tissue character presented in different types of MR images.</p> <p>This paper uses an algorithm integrating fuzzy-c-mean (FCM) and region growing techniques for automated tumor image segmentation from patients with menigioma. Only non-contrasted T1 and T2 -weighted MR images are included in the analysis. The study's aims are to correctly locate tumors in the images, and to detect those situated in the midline position of the brain.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The study used non-contrasted T1- and T2-weighted MR images from 29 patients with menigioma. After FCM clustering, 32 groups of images from each patient group were put through the region-growing procedure for pixels aggregation. Later, using knowledge-based information, the system selected tumor-containing images from these groups and merged them into one tumor image. An alternative semi-supervised method was added at this stage for comparison with the automatic method. Finally, the tumor image was optimized by a morphology operator. Results from automatic segmentation were compared to the "ground truth" (GT) on a pixel level. Overall data were then evaluated using a quantified system.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The quantified parameters, including the "percent match" (PM) and "correlation ratio" (CR), suggested a high match between GT and the present study's system, as well as a fair level of correspondence. The results were compatible with those from other related studies. The system successfully detected all of the tumors situated at the midline of brain.</p> <p>Six cases failed in the automatic group. One also failed in the semi-supervised alternative. The remaining five cases presented noticeable edema inside the brain. In the 23 successful cases, the PM and CR values in the two groups were highly related.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Results indicated that, even when using only two sets of non-contrasted MR images, the system is a reliable and efficient method of brain-tumor detection. With further development the system demonstrates high potential for practical clinical use.</p

Active Learning for Constrained Document Clustering with Uncertainty Region

Constrained clustering is intended to improve accuracy and personalization based on the constraints expressed by an Oracle. In this paper, a new constrained clustering algorithm is proposed and some of the informative data pairs are selected during an iterative process. Then, they are presented to the Oracle and their relation is answered with “Must-link (ML) or Cannot-link (CL).” In each iteration, first, the support vector machine (SVM) is utilized based on the label produced by the current clustering. According to the distance of each document from the hyperplane, the distance matrix is created. Also, based on cosine similarity of word2vector of each document, the similarity matrix is created. Two types of probability (similarity and degree of similarity) are calculated and they are smoothed for belonging to neighborhoods. Neighborhoods form the samples that are labeled by Oracle, to be in the same cluster. Finally, at the end of each iteration, the data with a greater level of uncertainty (in term of probability) is selected for questioning the oracle. In order to evaluate, the proposed method is compared with famous state-of-the-art methods based on two criteria and over a standard dataset. The result demonstrates an increased accuracy and stability of the obtained result with fewer questions