Discrete Wavelet Transform-Based Whole-Spectral and Subspectral Analysis for Improved Brain Tumor Clustering Using Single Voxel MR Spectroscopy

Many approaches have been considered for automatic grading of brain tumors by means of pattern recognition with magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS). Providing an improved technique which can assist clinicians in accurately identifying brain tumor grades is our main objective. The proposed technique, which is based on the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) of whole-spectral or subspectral information of key metabolites, combined with unsupervised learning, inspects the separability of the extracted wavelet features from the MRS signal to aid the clustering. In total, we included 134 short echo time single voxel MRS spectra (SV MRS) in our study that cover normal controls, low grade and high grade tumors. The combination of DWT-based whole-spectral or subspectral analysis and unsupervised clustering achieved an overall clustering accuracy of 94.8% and a balanced error rate of 7.8%. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first study using DWT combined with unsupervised learning to cluster brain SV MRS. Instead of dimensionality reduction on SV MRS or feature selection using model fitting, our study provides an alternative method of extracting features to obtain promising clustering results.