Analysis and classification of optical tomographic images of rheumatoid fingers with ANOVA and discriminate analysis

We present a study on the effectiveness of computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) from frequency-domain diffuse optical tomographic (FDOT) images. FDOT is used to obtain the distribution of tissue optical properties. Subsequently, the non-parametric Kruskal-Wallis ANOVA test is employed to verify statistically significant differences between the optical parameters of patients affected by RA and healthy volunteers. Furthermore, quadratic discriminate analysis (QDA) of the absorption (μa) and scattering (μa or μ's) distributions is used to classify subjects as affected or not affected by RA. We evaluate the classification efficiency by determining the sensitivity (Se), specificity (Sp), and the Youden index (Y). We find that combining features extracted from μa and μa or μ's images allows for more accurate classification than when μa or μa or μ's features are considered individually on their own. Combining μa and μa or μ's features yields values of up to Y = 0.75 (Se = 0.84 and Sp = 0.91). The best results when μa or μ's features are considered individually are Y = 0.65 (Se = 0.85 and Sp = 0.80) and Y = 0.70 (Se = 0.80 and Sp = 0.90), respectively.