Classification of brain tumors using the multilayer perceptron artificial neural network

Abstract

Information from 54 Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) brain tumor images (27 benign and 27 malignant) were collected and subjected to multilayer perceptron artificial neural network available on the well know software of IBM SPSS 17 (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences). After many attempts, automatic architecture was decided to be adopted in this research work. Thirteen shape and statistical characteristics of images were considered. The neural network revealed an 89.1 % of correct classification for the training sample and 100 % of correct classification for the test sample. The normalized importance of the considered characteristics showed that kurtosis accounted for 100 % which means that this variable has a substantial effect on how the network perform when predicting cases of brain tumor, contrast accounted for 64.3 %, correlation accounted for 56.7 %, and entropy accounted for 54.8 %. All remaining characteristics accounted for 21.3-46.8 % of normalized importance. The output of the neural networks showed that sensitivity and specificity were scored remarkably high level of probability as it approached % 96.