  More attention is being paid for feature importance ranking (FIR), in
particular when thousands of features can be extracted for intelligent
diagnosis and personalized medicine. A large number of FIR approaches have been
proposed, while few are integrated for comparison and real-life applications.
In this study, a matlab toolbox is presented and a total of 30 algorithms are
collected. Moreover, the toolbox is evaluated on a database of 163 ultrasound
images. To each breast mass lesion, 15 features are extracted. To figure out
the optimal subset of features for classification, all combinations of features
are tested and linear support vector machine is used for the malignancy
prediction of lesions annotated in ultrasound images. At last, the
effectiveness of FIR is analyzed according to performance comparison. The
toolbox is online (https://github.com/NicoYuCN/matFIR). In our future work,
more FIR methods, feature selection methods and machine learning classifiers
will be integrated.
