Radiomics based single and multi-class glioma classification using support vector machine variants

The common type of primary brain tumor is glioma. The mortality rate of glioma patients is high due to delayed diagnosis, incorrect grading and treatment planning. Traditionally, gliomas were classified into Low Grade (grade-I and grade-II) and High Grade (grade-III and grade-IV). However, World Health Organization has insisted to classify the grades into grade-I(G-I), grade II(G-II), grade III(G-III) and grade IV(G-IV) individually to aid the physicians in clinical decision-making. Although there are limited number of studies reported to differentiate individual grades, the classification accuracy was low. Consequently, in this work single-class (G-II vs. G-III, G-II vs. G-IV and G-III vs. G-IV) and multi-class (G-II vs. G-III+IV, G-III vs. G-II+IV and G-IV vs. G-II+III) analysis was performed using specific region of tumor and whole brain as Regions of Interest(ROI) by extracting radiomic features. The images for this study (N=75) were obtained from The Cancer Imaging Archive. Further, the statistically significant features were used in the classification of individual grades by implementing variants of Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm: SVM, Linear-SVM and Least-Squared SVM. Among these, Linear-SVM resulted in the highest classification accuracy (>80%) with average sensitivity, specificity and AUC values of >70%. The comparative analysis of whole brain versus tumor ROI showed that the latter yielded better classification accuracy. © 2021 IAE All rights reserved.