Automated Brain Tissue Classification by Multisignal Wavelet Decomposition and Independent Component Analysis

Multispectral analysis is a potential approach in simultaneous analysis of brain MRI sequences. However, conventional classification methods often fail to yield consistent accuracy in tissue classification and abnormality extraction. Feature extraction methods like Independent Component Analysis (ICA) have been effectively used in recent studies to improve the results. However, these methods were inefficient in identifying less frequently occurred features like small lesions. A new method, Multisignal Wavelet Independent Component Analysis (MW-ICA), is proposed in this work to resolve this issue. First, we applied a multisignal wavelet analysis on input multispectral data. Then, reconstructed signals from detail coefficients were used in conjunction with original input signals to do ICA. Finally, Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) clustering was performed on generated results for visual and quantitative analysis. Reproducibility and accuracy of the classification results from proposed method were evaluated by synthetic and clinical abnormal data. To ensure the positive effect of the new method in classification, we carried out a detailed comparative analysis of reproduced tissues with those from conventional ICA. Reproduced small abnormalities were observed to give good accuracy/Tanimoto Index values, 98.69%/0.89, in clinical analysis. Experimental results recommend MW-ICA as a promising method for improved brain tissue classification.