Osteosarcoma Patients Classification Using Plain X-Rays and Metabolomic Data

Osteosarcoma is the most common type of bone cancer. The primary means of osteosarcoma diagnosis is through evaluating plain x-rays. Using image analysis techniques, features that clinicians use to diagnose osteosarcoma can be quantified and studied using computer algorithms. In this paper, we classify benign tumor patients and osteosarcoma patients using both image features and metabolomic data. These two types of feature sets are processed with feature selection algorithms - recursive feature elimination and information gain. The selected features are then assessed by two classification models - random forest and support vector machine (SVM). The performances of the two models are evaluated and compared using receiver operating characteristic curves. The random forest classifier outperformed the SVM, with a sensitivity of .92 and a specificity of .78.