Automatic Classification of Brain MRI Images Using SVM and Neural Network Classifiers

Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) is a technique where diagnosis is performed in an automatic way. This work has developed a CAD system for automatically classifying the given brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) image into ‘tumor affected’ or ‘tumor not affected’. The input image is preprocessed using wiener filter and Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE). The image is then quantized and aggregated to get a reduced image data. The reduced image is then segmented into four regions such as gray matter, white matter, cerebrospinal fluid and high intensity tumor cluster using Fuzzy C Means (FCM) algorithm. The tumor region is then extracted using the intensity metric. A contour is evolved over the identified tumor region using Active Contour model (ACM) to extract exact tumor segment. Thirty five features including Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) features, Gray Level Run Length Matrix features (GLRL), statistical features and shape based features are extracted from the tumor region. Neural network and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers are trained using these features. Results indicate that Support vector machine classifier with quadratic kernel function performs better than Radial Basis Function (RBF) kernel function and neural network classifier with fifty hidden nodes performs better than twenty five hidden nodes. It is also evident from the result that average running time of FCM is less when used on reduced image data.