Evaluation and visual exploratory analysis of DCE-MRI Data of breast lesions based on morphological features and novel dimension reduction methods

Visual exploratory data analysis represents a well-accepted imaging modality for high-dimensional DCE-MRI-derived breast cancer data. We employ this paradigm for discriminating between malignant and benign lesions based on different shape descriptors thanks to proven and novel dimension reduction algorithms. We demonstrate that shape descriptors based on moments emphasizing local shape structure changes such as weight ed 3D Krawtchouk moments outperform global averaging moments such as geometric moment invariants in terms of discrimination of benign/malignant lesions. The best visualization of tumor shapes in a two-dimensional space is achieved based on nonlinear mapping methods, especially the ones that consider neighborhood ranks.