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Automated recognition of lung diseases in CT images based on the optimum-path forest classifier

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Abstract

The World Health Organization estimated that around 300 million people have asthma, and 210 million people are affected by Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). Also, it is estimated that the number of deaths from COPD increased \(30\%\) in 2015 and COPD will become the third major cause of death worldwide by 2030. These statistics about lung diseases get worse when one considers fibrosis, calcifications and other diseases. For the public health system, the early and accurate diagnosis of any pulmonary disease is mandatory for effective treatments and prevention of further deaths. In this sense, this work consists in using information from lung images to identify and classify lung diseases. Two steps are required to achieve these goals: automatically extraction of representative image features of the lungs and recognition of the possible disease using a computational classifier. As to the first step, this work proposes an approach that combines Spatial Interdependence Matrix (SIM) and Visual Information Fidelity (VIF). Concerning the second step, we propose to employ a Gaussian-based distance to be used together with the optimum-path forest (OPF) classifier to classify the lungs under study as normal or with fibrosis, or even affected by COPD. Moreover, to confirm the robustness of OPF in this classification problem, we also considered Support Vector Machines and a Multilayer Perceptron Neural Network for comparison purposes. Overall, the results confirmed the good performance of the OPF configured with the Gaussian distance when applied to SIM- and VIF-based features. The performance scores achieved by the OPF classifier were as follows: average accuracy of \(98.2\%\), total processing time of 117 microseconds in a common personal laptop, and F-score of 95.2% for the three classification classes. These results showed that OPF is a very competitive classifier, and suitable to be used for lung disease classification.

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  1. http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~afalcao/libopf/LibOPF.tar.gz.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Graduate Program in Computer Science from the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Ceará and the Department of Computer Engineering from the Walter Cantídio University Hospital of the Federal University of Ceará, in Brazil, for the support given.

The first author acknowledges the sponsorship from the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Ceará through grants PROINFRA/2013 and PROAPP/2014. The author acknowledges also the sponsorship from the Brazilian National Council for Research and Development (CNPq).

Victor Hugo C. de Albuquerque thanks CNPq for providing financial support through grants 470501/2013-8 and 301928/2014-2.

João P. Papa is grateful to São Paulo Research Foundation grants #2014/16250-9 and #2014/12236-1, as well as CNPq grant #306166/2014-3.

Authors gratefully acknowledge the funding of Project NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000022—SciTech—Science and Technology for Competitive and Sustainable Industries, cofinanced by “Programa Operacional Regional do Norte” (NORTE2020), through “Fundo Europeu de Desenvolvimento Regional” (FEDER).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratório de Processamento Digital de Imagens e Simulação Computacional, Instituto Federal de Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia do Ceará (IFCE), Campus Maracanaú, Ceará, Brazil

    Pedro P. Rebouças Filho, Antônio C. da Silva Barros & Geraldo L. B. Ramalho

  2. Departamento de Ciência da Computação, Universidade Estadual Paulista, Bauru, São Paulo, Brazil

    Clayton R. Pereira & João Paulo Papa

  3. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Informática Aplicada, Universidade de Fortaleza, Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil

    Victor Hugo C. de Albuquerque

  4. Instituto de Ciência e Inovação em Engenharia Mecânica e Engenharia Industrial, Departamento de Engenharia Mecânica, Faculdade de Engenharia, Universidade do Porto, Porto, Portugal

    João Manuel R. S. Tavares

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  1. Pedro P. Rebouças Filho
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  2. Antônio C. da Silva Barros
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  3. Geraldo L. B. Ramalho
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  6. Victor Hugo C. de Albuquerque
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  7. João Manuel R. S. Tavares
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Correspondence to João Manuel R. S. Tavares.

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Filho, P.P.R., Barros, A.C.d.S., Ramalho, G.L.B. et al. Automated recognition of lung diseases in CT images based on the optimum-path forest classifier. Neural Comput & Applic 31 (Suppl 2), 901–914 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-017-3048-y

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