  The majority of primary Central Nervous System (CNS) tumors in the brain are
among the most aggressive diseases affecting humans. Early detection of brain
tumor types, whether benign or malignant, glial or non-glial, is critical for
cancer prevention and treatment, ultimately improving human life expectancy.
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) stands as the most effective technique to
detect brain tumors by generating comprehensive brain images through scans.
However, human examination can be error-prone and inefficient due to the
complexity, size, and location variability of brain tumors. Recently, automated
classification techniques using machine learning (ML) methods, such as
Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), have demonstrated significantly higher
accuracy than manual screening, while maintaining low computational costs.
Nonetheless, deep learning-based image classification methods, including CNN,
face challenges in estimating class probabilities without proper model
calibration. In this paper, we propose a novel brain tumor image classification
method, called SIBOW-SVM, which integrates the Bag-of-Features (BoF) model with
SIFT feature extraction and weighted Support Vector Machines (wSVMs). This new
approach effectively captures hidden image features, enabling the
differentiation of various tumor types and accurate label predictions.
Additionally, the SIBOW-SVM is able to estimate the probabilities of images
belonging to each class, thereby providing high-confidence classification
decisions. We have also developed scalable and parallelable algorithms to
facilitate the practical implementation of SIBOW-SVM for massive images. As a
benchmark, we apply the SIBOW-SVM to a public data set of brain tumor MRI
images containing four classes: glioma, meningioma, pituitary, and normal. Our
results show that the new method outperforms state-of-the-art methods,
including CNN.
