Synergetic neuro-fuzzy feature selection and classification of brain tumors

Brain tumors constitute one of the deadliest forms of cancers, with a high mortality rate. Of these, Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) remains the most common and lethal primary brain tumor in adults. Tumor biopsy being challenging for brain tumor patients, noninvasive techniques like imaging play an important role in the process of brain cancer detection, diagnosis and prognosis; particularly using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Therefore, development of advanced extraction and selection strategies of quantitative MRI features become necessary for noninvasively predicting and grading the tumors. In this paper we extract 56 three-dimensional quantitative MRI features, related to tumor image intensities, shape and texture, from 254 brain tumor patients. An adaptive neuro-fuzzy classifier based on linguistic hedges (ANFC-LH) is developed to simultaneously select significant features and predict the tumor grade. ANFC-LH achieves a significantly higher testing accuracy (85.83%) as compared to existing standard classifiers.