Optical pathology using oral tissue fluorescence spectra: classification by principal component analysis and k-means nearest neighbor analysis.

The spectral analysis and classification for discrimination of pulsed laser-induced autofluorescence spectra of pathologically certified normal, premalignant, and malignant oral tissues recorded at a 325-nm excitation are carried out using MATLAB@R6-based principal component analysis (PCA) and k-means nearest neighbor (k-NN) analysis separately on the same set of spectral data. Six features such as mean, median, maximum intensity, energy, spectral residuals, and standard deviation are extracted from each spectrum of the 60 training samples (spectra) belonging to the normal, premalignant, and malignant groups and they are used to perform PCA on the reference database. Standard calibration models of normal, premalignant, and malignant samples are made using cluster analysis. We show that a feature vector of length 6 could be reduced to three components using the PCA technique. After performing PCA on the feature space, the first three principal component (PC) scores, which contain all the diagnostic information, are retained and the remaining scores containing only noise are discarded. The new feature space is thus constructed using three PC scores only and is used as input database for the k-NN classification. Using this transformed feature space, the centroids for normal, premalignant, and malignant samples are computed and the efficient classification for different classes of oral samples is achieved. A performance evaluation of k-NN classification results is made by calculating the statistical parameters specificity, sensitivity, and accuracy and they are found to be 100, 94.5, and 96.17%, respectively.