A computer-aided grading of glioma tumor using deep residual networks fusion.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Among different cancer types, glioma is considered as a potentially fatal brain cancer that arises from glial cells. Early diagnosis of glioma helps the physician in offering effective treatment to the patients. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)-based Computer-Aided Diagnosis for the brain tumors has attracted a lot of attention in the literature in recent years. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning-based computer-aided diagnosis for glioma tumors.

METHODS

The proposed method incorporates a two-level classification of gliomas. Firstly, the tumor is classified into low-or high-grade and secondly, the low-grade tumors are classified into two types based on the presence of chromosome arms 1p/19q. The feature representations of four residual networks have been used to solve the problem by utilizing transfer learning approach. Furthermore, we have fused these trained models using a novel Dempster-shafer Theory (DST)-based fusion scheme in order to enhance the classification performance. Extensive data augmentation strategies are also utilized to avoid over-fitting of the discrimination models.

RESULTS

Extensive experiments have been performed on an MRI dataset to show the effectiveness of the method. It has been found that our method achieves 95.87% accuracy for glioma classification. The results obtained by our method have also been compared with different existing methods. The comparative study reveals that our method not only outperforms traditional machine learning-based methods, but it also produces better results to state-of-the-art deep learning-based methods.

CONCLUSION

The fusion of different residual networks enhances the tumor classification performance. The experimental findings indicates that Dempster-shafer Theory (DST)-based fusion technique produces superior performance in comparison to other fusion schemes.