Wavelet entropy and directed acyclic graph support vector machine for detection of patients with unilateral hearing loss in MRI scanning

Aim: Sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) is correlated to many neurodegenerative disease. Now more and more computer vision based methods are using to detect it in an automatic way. Materials: We have in total 49 subjects, scanned by 3.0T MRI (Siemens Medical Solutions, Erlangen, Germany). The subjects contain 14 patients with right-sided hearing loss (RHL), 15 patients with left-sided hearing loss (LHL), and 20 healthy controls (HC). Method: We treat this as a three-class classification problem: RHL, LHL, and HC. Wavelet entropy (WE) was selected from the magnetic resonance images of each subjects, and then submitted to a directed acyclic graph support vector machine (DAG-SVM). Results: The 10 repetition results of 10-fold cross validation shows 3-level decomposition will yield an overall accuracy of 95.10% for this three-class classification problem, higher than feedforward neural network, decision tree, and naive Bayesian classifier. Conclusions: This computer-aided diagnosis system is promising. We hope this study can attract more computer vision method for detecting hearing loss.