Automatic detection of osteosarcoma based on integrated features and feature selection using binary arithmetic optimization algorithm

Osteosarcoma is one of the most common malignant bone tumors mostly found in children and teenagers. Manual detection of osteosarcoma requires expertise and it is a labour-intensive process. If detected on time, the mortality rate can be reduced. With the advent of new technologies, automatic detection systems are used to analyse and classify medical images, which reduces the dependency on experts and leads to faster processing. In this paper, an automatic detection system: Integrated Features-Feature Selection Model for Classification (IF-FSM-C) to detect osteosarcoma from the high-resolution whole slide images (WSIs) is proposed. The novelty of the proposed approach is the use of integrated features obtained by fusion of features extracted using traditional handcrafted (HC) feature extraction techniques and deep learning models (DLMs) namely EfficientNet-B0 and Xception. To further improve the performance of the proposed system, feature selection (FS) is performed. Here, two binary variants of recently proposed Arithmetic Optimization Algorithm (AOA) known as BAOA-S and BAOA-V are proposed to perform FS. The selected features are given to a classifier that classifies the WSIs into Viable tumor (VT), Non-viable tumor (NVT) and non-tumor (NT). Experiments are performed to compare the performance of proposed IF-FSM-C to the classifiers which use HC or deep learning features alone as well as state-of-the-art methods for osteosarcoma detection. The best overall accuracy of 96.08% is obtained when integrated features extracted using HC techniques and Xception are used. The overall accuracy is enhanced to 99.54% after applying BAOA-S for FS. Further, the application of BAOA-S for FS reduces the number of features with the best model having only 188 features compared to 2118 features if no FS is applied.