Detection of Thymoma Disease Using mRMR Feature Selection and Transformer Models

Thymoma is a tumor that originates in the thymus gland, a part of the human body located behind the breastbone. It is a malignant disease that is rare in children but more common in adults and usually does not spread outside the thymus. The exact cause of thymic disease is not known, but it is thought to be more common in people infected with the EBV virus at an early age. Various surgical methods are used in clinical settings to treat thymoma. Expert opinion is very important in the diagnosis of the disease. Recently, next-generation technologies have become increasingly important in disease detection. Today's early detection systems already use transformer models that are open to technological advances.

What makes this study different is the use of transformer models instead of traditional deep learning models. The data used in this study were obtained from patients undergoing treatment at Fırat University, Department of Thoracic Surgery. The dataset consisted of two types of classes: thymoma disease images and non-thymoma disease images. The proposed approach consists of preprocessing, model training, feature extraction, feature set fusion between models, efficient feature selection, and classification. In the preprocessing step, unnecessary regions of the images were cropped, and the region of interest (ROI) technique was applied. Four types of transformer models (Deit3, Maxvit, Swin, and ViT) were used for model training. As a result of the training of the models, the feature sets obtained from the best three models were merged between the models (Deit3 and Swin, Deit3 and ViT, Deit3 and ViT, Swin and ViT, and Deit3 and Swin and ViT). The combined feature set of the model (Deit3 and ViT) that gave the best performance with fewer features was analyzed using the mRMR feature selection method. The SVM method was used in the classification process.

With the mRMR feature selection method, 100% overall accuracy was achieved with feature sets containing fewer features. The cross-validation technique was used to verify the overall accuracy of the proposed approach and 99.22% overall accuracy was achieved in the analysis with this technique.

These findings emphasize the added value of the proposed approach in the detection of thymoma.