Classification of structural images via high-dimensional image warping, robust feature extraction, and SVM

This paper presents a method for classification of medical images, using machine learning and deformation-based morphometry. A morphological representation of the anatomy of interest is first obtained using high-dimensional template warping, from which regions that display strong correlations between morphological measurements and the classification (clinical) variable are extracted using a watershed segmentation, taking into account the regional smoothness of the correlation map which is estimated by a cross-validation strategy in order to achieve robustness to outliers. A Support Vector Machine-Recursive Feature Elimination (SVM-RFE) technique is then used to rank computed features from the extracted regions, according to their effect on the leave-one-out error bound. Finally, SVM classification is applied using the best set of features, and it is tested using leave-one-out. The results from a group of 61 brain images of female normal controls and schizophrenia patients demonstrate not only high classification accuracy (91.8%) and steep ROC curves, but also exceptional stability with respect to the number of selected features and the SVM kernel size.