Support vector machines for improving the classification of brain PET images

The classification of brain PET volumes is carried out in three main steps: (1) registration, (2) feature extraction and (3) classification. The PET images were already smoothed with a 16 mm isotropic Gaussian kernel and registered within the Talairach and Tournoux reference system. To make the registration more accurate over a single reference, a method based on optical flow was applied. Feature extraction is carried out by principal component analysis (PCA). Support vector machines (SVM) are then used for classification, because they are better controlled than neural networks (NN) and well adapted to small sample size problems. SVM are constructed by a training algorithm that maximizes the margin between the training vectors and the decision boundary. The algorithm is simple quadratic programming under linear constraints, which leads to global optimum. The decision boundary is expressed as a linear combination of supporting vectors which are a subset of the training vectors closest to the decision boundary. After registration, NN and SVM were trained with the features extracted by PCA from the training set. The estimate error rate is 7.1% for SVM and 14.3% for NN.