Computer-Aided Diagnosis and Staging of Pancreatic Cancer Based on CT Images

Pancreatic cancer (PC) is a malignant tumor that seriously threatens the survival of patients. Artificial classification has practical difficulties, such as unstable classification accuracy, a heavy workload, and the classification results depend on the subjective judgment of the clinician during the diagnosis and staging of PC. In addition, accurate PC staging could better help clinicians deliver the optimal therapeutic schedule for PC patients of different stages. Therefore, this study proposes a comprehensive medical computer-aided method for preoperative diagnosis and staging of PC based on an ensemble learning-support vector machine (EL-SVM) and computed tomography (CT) images. The least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) algorithm was chosen for feature selection. In contrast to no feature selection, the model optimization time decreased by 19.94 seconds while maintaining precision. The EL-SVM learner was used to classify 168 CT images of normal pancreas and different stages of PC. The experimental results demonstrated that the normal pancreas (normal)-pancreatic cancer early stage (early stage) classification accuracy was 86.61%, the normal-pancreatic cancer stage III (stage III) classification accuracy was 87.04%, the normal-pancreatic cancer stage IV (stage IV) classification accuracy was 91.63%, the normal-PC classification accuracy was 87.89%, the early stage-stage III classification accuracy was 75.03%, and the early stage-stage IV classification accuracy was 81.22%, and the stage III-stage IV classification accuracy was 82.48%. Our experimental results prove that our proposed method is feasible and promising for clinical applications for the preoperative diagnosis and staging of PC via CT images.