Sparse Contribution Feature Selection and Classifiers Optimized by Concave-Convex Variation for HCC Image Recognition

Accurate classification of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) image is of great importance in pathology diagnosis and treatment. This paper proposes a concave-convex variation (CCV) method to optimize three classifiers (random forest, support vector machine, and extreme learning machine) for the more accurate HCC image classification results. First, in preprocessing stage, hematoxylin-eosin (H&E) pathological images are enhanced using bilateral filter and each HCC image patch is obtained under the guidance of pathologists. Then, after extracting the complete features of each patch, a new sparse contribution (SC) feature selection model is established to select the beneficial features for each classifier. Finally, a concave-convex variation method is developed to improve the performance of classifiers. Experiments using 1260 HCC image patches demonstrate that our proposed CCV classifiers have improved greatly compared to each original classifier and CCV-random forest (CCV-RF) performs the best for HCC image recognition.