Histological grade and type classification of glioma using Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Glioma is one of the most common brain tumors with high mortality and its histological grading and typing is important both in therapeutic decision and prognosis evaluation. This paper aims at using the high-throughput image feature analysis method to estimate the histological grade and type of a patient by using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) instead of histological examination. The proposed method consists of the initial label definition, the region-of-interest delineation, the self-adaptive feature extraction, the feature subset selection, and the multi-class voting classification. Hereinto, a novel feature extraction strategy is designed, which could avoid the MRI scan diversity so as to get the robust feature extraction result and make the proposed framework more stable and effective. This method was validated on a database of 124 patients with the grade II to IV of 78, 25, and 21, and with astrocytoma, oligodendroglioma, oligoastrocytoma of 86, 16, and 22, respectively. We show that by using the leave-one-out cross-validation, the multi-class classification accuracy and macro average could reach 88.71%, 0.8362 respectively for the grade classification, and 70.97%, 0.5692 respectively for the type classification. It can be concluded that the histological grade and subtype information could be estimated from the MRI image analysis.