Image enhancement methods on extracted texture features to detect prostate cancer by employing machine learning techniques

Prostate cancer (PCa) is the second most diagnosed cancer of men all over the world. The aim of this research was to improve PCa detection based on image enhancement methods including image adjustment and morphological erosion operations and then compute the texture features. We then employed robust Machine Learning (ML) techniques such as the Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machine (SVM) kernels: Polynomial, Radial Base Function (RBF), Gaussian and Decision Tree (DT) based on extracted texture features. The Cross validation (Jack-Knife k-Fold) was performed, and performance was evaluated in term of Receiver Operating Curve (ROC), Specificity, Sensitivity, Positive Predictive Value (PPV), Negative Predictive Value (NPV), False Positive Rate (FPR). The highest detection performance based on morphological erosion operation on texture features was obtained using SVM polynomial with sensitivity (99.82%), specificity (96.63%), accuracy (98.59%) and AUC (0.9994). The image adjustment methods yielded the highest detection performance with sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of 100% and AUC of 1.00 using ML SVM selected kernels. The results reveal that proposed image enhancement methods have the potential to accurately predict PCa. Thus, this approach can be better utilized by clinicians for early prediction of PCa for further diagnostic and treatment of the patients.