Adaptive spectral window sizes for feature extraction from optical spectra

We propose an approach to adaptively adjust the spectral window size used to extract features from optical spectra. Previous studies have employed spectral features extracted by dividing the spectra into several spectral windows of a fixed width. However, the choice of spectral window size was arbitrary. We hypothesize that by adaptively adjusting the spectral window sizes, the trends in the data will be captured more accurately. Our method was tested on a diffuse reflectance spectroscopy dataset obtained in a study of oblique polarization reflectance spectroscopy of oral mucosa lesions. The diagnostic task is to classify lesions into one of four histopathology groups: normal, benign, mild dysplasia, or severe dysplasia (including carcinoma). Nine features were extracted from each of the spectral windows. We computed the area (AUC) under Receiver Operating Characteristic curve to select the most discriminatory wavelength intervals. We performed pairwise classifications using Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) with leave-one-out cross validation. The results showed that for discriminating benign lesions from mild or severe dysplasia, the adaptive spectral window size features achieved AUC of 0.84, while a fixed spectral window size of 20 nm had AUC of 0.71, and an AUC of 0.64 is achieved with a large window size containing all wavelengths. The AUCs of all feature combinations were also calculated. These results suggest that the new adaptive spectral window size method effectively extracts features that enable accurate classification of oral mucosa lesions.