Automatic detection of breast cancers in mammograms using structured support vector machines

Breast cancer is one of the most common cancers diagnosed in women. Large margin classifiers like the support vector machine (SVM) have been reported effective in computer-assisted diagnosis systems for breast cancers. However, since the separating hyperplane determination exclusively relies on support vectors, the SVM is essentially a local classifier and its performance can be further improved. In this work, we introduce a structured SVM model to determine if each mammographic region is normal or cancerous by considering the cluster structures in the training set. The optimization problem in this new model can be solved efficiently by being formulated as one second order cone programming problem. Experimental evaluation is performed on the Digital Database for Screening Mammography (DDSM) dataset. Various types of features, including curvilinear features, texture features, Gabor features, and multi-resolution features, are extracted from the sample images. We then select the salient features using the recursive feature elimination algorithm. The structured SVM achieves better detection performance compared with a well-tested SVM classifier in terms of the area under the ROC curve.     

Human motion recognition using support vector machines

We propose a motion recognition strategy that represents each videoclip by a set of filtered images, each of which corresponds to a frame. Using a filtered-image classifier based on support vector machines, we classify a videoclip by applying majority voting over the predicted labels of its filtered images and, for online classification, we identify the most likely type of action at any moment by applying majority voting over the predicted labels of the filtered images within a sliding window. We also define a classification confidence and the associated threshold in both cases, which enable us to identify the existence of an unknown type of motion and, together with the proposed recognition strategy, make it possible to build a real-time motion recognition system that cannot only make classifications in real-time, but also learn new types of motions and recognize them in the future. The proposed strategy is demonstrated on real datasets.     

支持向量机和最小二乘支持向量机的比较及应用研究

介绍和比较了支持向量机分类器和量小二乘支持向量机分类器的算法。并将支持向量机分类器和量小二乘支持向量机分类器应用于心脏病诊断，取得了较高的准确率。所用数据来自UCI bench—mark数据集。实验结果表明，支持向量机和量小二乘支持向量机在医疗诊断中有很大的应用潜力。     

面向乳腺癌辅助诊断的改进支持向量机方法

根据针吸细胞学方法影像中提取的特征值, 设计了一种改进的支持向量机分类方法, 并应用于乳腺癌的辅助诊断。通过对几种常用核函数的对比分析, 所建立的新核函数在诊断中具有很好的综合性能。使用实际临床数据分析显示, 该方法比模因佩雷托(memetic Pareto artificial neural network, MPANN)与一种改进型人工神经网络(evolutionary artificial neural network, EANN)方法在乳腺癌辅助诊断中具有更好的效果, 可以为医疗机构对该疾病的诊断提供有力的决策支持。     

Fuzzy functions with support vector machines

A new fuzzy system modeling (FSM) approach that identifies the fuzzy functions using support vector machines (SVM) is proposed. This new approach is structurally different from the fuzzy rule base approaches and fuzzy regression methods. It is a new alternate version of the earlier FSM with fuzzy functions approaches. SVM is applied to determine the support vectors for each fuzzy cluster obtained by fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering algorithm. Original input variables, the membership values obtained from the FCM together with their transformations form a new augmented set of input variables. The performance of the proposed system modeling approach is compared to previous fuzzy functions approaches, standard SVM, LSE methods using an artificial sparse dataset and a real-life non-sparse dataset. The results indicate that the proposed fuzzy functions with support vector machines approach is a feasible and stable method for regression problems and results in higher performances than the classical statistical methods.     

Optimal feature selection for support vector machines

Selecting relevant features for support vector machine (SVM) classifiers is important for a variety of reasons such as generalization performance, computational efficiency, and feature interpretability. Traditional SVM approaches to feature selection typically extract features and learn SVM parameters independently. Independently performing these two steps might result in a loss of information related to the classification process. This paper proposes a convex energy-based framework to jointly perform feature selection and SVM parameter learning for linear and non-linear kernels. Experiments on various databases show significant reduction of features used while maintaining classification performance.     

Intelligent breast cancer recognition using particle swarm optimization and support vector machines

Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women, except for skin cancer, but early detection of breast cancer improves the chances of survivability. Data mining is widely used for this purpose. As technology develops, large number of breast tumour features are being collected. Using all these features for cancer recognition is expensive and time-consuming. Feature extraction is necessary for increasing the classification accuracy. The goal of this work is to recognise breast cancer using extracted features. To reach this goal, a combination of clustering and classification is used. Particle swarm optimization is used to recognise tumour patterns. The membership degree of each tumour to the patterns is calculated and considered as a new feature. Support vector machine is then employed to classify tumours. Finally this method is analysed in terms of its accuracy, specificity, sensitivity and CPU time consuming using Wisconsin Diagnostic Breast Cancer data set.     

Detecting corn tassels using computer vision and support vector machines

An automated solution for maize detasseling is very important for maize growers who want to reduce production costs. Quality assurance of maize requires constantly monitoring production fields to ensure that only hybrid seed is produced. To achieve this cross-pollination, tassels of female plants have to be removed for ensuring all the pollen for producing the seed crop comes from the male rows. This removal process is called detasseling. Computer vision methods could help positioning the cutting locations of tassels to achieve a more precise detasseling process in a row. In this study, a computer vision algorithm was developed to detect cutting locations of corn tassels in natural outdoor maize canopy using conventional color images and computer vision with a minimum number of false positives. Proposed algorithm used color informations with a support vector classifier for image binarization. A number of morphological operations were implemented to determine potential tassel locations. Shape and texture features were used to reduce false positives. A hierarchical clustering method was utilized to merge multiple detections for the same tassel and to determine the final locations of tassels. Proposed algorithm performed with a correct detection rate of 81.6% for the test set. Detection of maize tassels in natural canopy images is a quite difficult task due to various backgrounds, different illuminations, occlusions, shadowed regions, and color similarities. The results of the study indicated that detecting cut location of corn tassels is feasible using regular color images.     

Density-induced margin support vector machines

This paper proposes a new classifier called density-induced margin support vector machines (DMSVMs). DMSVMs belong to a family of SVM-like classifiers. Thus, DMSVMs inherit good properties from support vector machines (SVMs), e.g., unique and global solution, and sparse representation for the decision function. For a given data set, DMSVMs require to extract relative density degrees for all training data points. These density degrees can be taken as relative margins of corresponding training data points. Moreover, we propose a method for estimating relative density degrees by using the K nearest neighbor method. We also show the upper bound on the leave-out-one error of DMSVMs for a binary classification problem and prove it. Promising results are obtained on toy as well as real-world data sets.     

Fully automatic and segmentation-robust classification of breast tumors based on local texture analysis of ultrasound images

Region of interest (ROI) is a region used to extract features. In breast ultrasound (BUS) image, the ROI is a breast tumor region. Because of poor image quality (low SNR (signal/noise ratio), low contrast, blurry boundaries, etc.), it is difficult to segment the BUS image accurately and produce a ROI which precisely covers the tumor region. Due to the requirement of accurate ROI for feature extraction, fully automatic classification of BUS images becomes a difficult task. In this paper, a novel fully automatic classification method for BUS images is proposed which can be divided into two steps: “ROI generation step” and “ROI classification step”. The ROI generation step focuses on finding a credible ROI instead of finding the precise tumor location. The ROI classification step employs a novel feature extraction and classification strategy. First, some points in the ROI are selected as the “classification checkpoints” which are evenly distributed in the ROI, and the local texture features around each classification checkpoint are extracted. For each ROI, all the classification checkpoints are classified. Finally, the class of the BUS image is determined by analyzing every classification checkpoint in the corresponding ROI. Both steps were implemented by utilizing a supervised texture classification approach. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is very robust to the segmentation of BUS images, and very effective and useful for classifying breast tumors.     

A note on Platt’s probabilistic outputs for support vector machines

Platt’s probabilistic outputs for Support Vector Machines (Platt, J. in Smola, A., et al. (eds.) Advances in large margin classifiers. Cambridge, 2000) has been popular for applications that require posterior class probabilities. In this note, we propose an improved algorithm that theoretically converges and avoids numerical difficulties. A simple and ready-to-use pseudo code is included. Editor: Dale Schuurmans.     

Texture classification using the support vector machines

In recent years, support vector machines (SVMs) have demonstrated excellent performance in a variety of pattern recognition problems. In this paper, we apply SVMs for texture classification, using translation-invariant features generated from the discrete wavelet frame transform. To alleviate the problem of selecting the right kernel parameter in the SVM, we use a fusion scheme based on multiple SVMs, each with a different setting of the kernel parameter. Compared to the traditional Bayes classifier and the learning vector quantization algorithm, SVMs, and, in particular, the fused output from multiple SVMs, produce more accurate classification results on the Brodatz texture album.     

Three-parameter sequential minimal optimization for support vector machines

The well-known sequential minimal optimization (SMO) algorithm is the most commonly used algorithm for numerical solutions of the support vector learning problems. At each iteration in the traditional SMO algorithm, also called 2PSMO algorithm in this paper, it jointly optimizes only two chosen parameters. The two parameters are selected either heuristically or randomly, whilst the optimization with respect to the two chosen parameters is performed analytically. The 2PSMO algorithm is naturally generalized to the three-parameter sequential minimal optimization (3PSMO) algorithm in this paper. At each iteration of this new algorithm, it jointly optimizes three chosen parameters. As in 2PSMO algorithm, the three parameters are selected either heuristically or randomly, whilst the optimization with respect to the three chosen parameters is performed analytically. Consequently, the main difference between these two algorithms is that the optimization is performed at each iteration of the 2PSMO algorithm on a line segment, whilst that of the 3PSMO algorithm on a two-dimensional region consisting of infinitely many line segments. This implies that the maximum can be attained more efficiently by 3PSMO algorithm. Main updating formulae of both algorithms for each support vector learning problem are presented. To assess the efficiency of the 3PSMO algorithm compared with the 2PSMO algorithm, 14 benchmark datasets, 7 for classification and 7 for regression, will be tested and numerical performances are compared. Simulation results demonstrate that the 3PSMO outperforms the 2PSMO algorithm significantly in both executing time and computation complexity.     

Prediction model building with clustering-launched classification and support vector machines in credit scoring

Recently, credit scoring has become a very important task as credit cards are now widely used by customers. A method that can accurately predict credit scoring is greatly needed and good prediction techniques can help to predict credit more accurately. One powerful classifier, the support vector machine (SVM), was successfully applied to a wide range of domains. In recent years, researchers have applied the SVM-based in the prediction of credit scoring, and the results have been shown it to be effective. In this study, two real world credit datasets in the University of California Irvine Machine Learning Repository were selected. SVM and a new classifier, clustering-launched classification (CLC), were employed to predict the accuracy of credit scoring. The advantages of using CLC are that it can classify data efficiently and only need one parameter needs to be decided. In substance, the results show that CLC is better than SVM. Therefore, CLC is an effective tool to predict credit scoring.     

电阻抗扫描成像计算机辅助诊断方法研究

为了提高电阻抗扫描成像EISI(Electrical Impedance Scanning Imaging)在乳腺疾病检查方面的准确性,将独立分量方法(ICA)应用于EISI数据的特征提取,并结合支持向量机(SVM)进行乳腺疾病计算机辅助诊断(CAD)。实验结果表明:ICA方法所提取的特征对于乳腺疾病分类是有效的。对于良性肿瘤和恶性肿瘤的鉴别,提出的CAD方法灵敏度为74.2%,特异度为82.8%,准确度为80%。结合所提出的CAD方法和传统的EISI检查方法,可以提高EISI在乳腺疾病检查方面的可靠性,降低假阳性率,避免对良性肿瘤患者进行活检。     

An improved incremental training algorithm for support vector machines using active query

In this paper, we present an improved incremental training algorithm for support vector machines (SVMs). Instead of selecting training samples randomly, we divide them into groups and apply the k-means clustering algorithm to collect the initial set of training samples. In active query, we assign a weight to each sample according to its confidence factor and its distance to the separating hyperplane. The confidence factor is calculated from the error upper bound of the SVM to indicate the closeness of the current hyperplane to the optimal hyperplane. A criterion is developed to eliminate non-informative training samples incrementally. Experimental results show our algorithm works successfully on artificial and real data, and is superior to the existing methods.     

Pulse-coupled neural networks and one-class support vector machines for geometry invariant texture retrieval

The pulse-coupled neural network (PCNN) has been widely used in image processing. The outputs of PCNN represent unique features of original stimulus and are invariant to translation, rotation, scaling and distortion, which is particularly suitable for feature extraction. In this paper, PCNN and intersecting cortical model (ICM), which is a simplified version of PCNN model, are applied to extract geometrical changes of rotation and scale invariant texture features, then an one-class support vector machine based classification method is employed to train and predict the features. The experimental results show that the pulse features outperform of the classic Gabor features in aspects of both feature extraction time and retrieval accuracy, and the proposed one-class support vector machine based retrieval system is more accurate and robust to geometrical changes than the traditional Euclidean distance based system.