Comparing the Effects of Persistence Barcodes Aggregation and Feature Concatenation on Medical Imaging

TL;DR

This paper compares two methods of using persistent homology features in medical imaging classification, finding that feature concatenation outperforms barcode aggregation in preserving information and improving model accuracy.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of persistence barcode aggregation versus feature concatenation, demonstrating the superiority of concatenation for medical image classification.

Findings

Feature concatenation yields better classification accuracy.

Concatenation preserves more detailed topological information.

Aggregation results in less effective model performance.

Abstract

In medical image analysis, feature engineering plays an important role in the design and performance of machine learning models. Persistent homology (PH), from the field of topological data analysis (TDA), demonstrates robustness and stability to data perturbations and addresses the limitation from traditional feature extraction approaches where a small change in input results in a large change in feature representation. Using PH, we store persistent topological and geometrical features in the form of the persistence barcode whereby large bars represent global topological features and small bars encapsulate geometrical information of the data. When multiple barcodes are computed from 2D or 3D medical images, two approaches can be used to construct the final topological feature vector in each dimension: aggregating persistence barcodes followed by featurization or concatenating topological feature vectors derived from each barcode. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive analysis across diverse medical imaging datasets to compare the effects of the two aforementioned approaches on the performance of classification models. The results of this analysis indicate that feature concatenation preserves detailed topological information from individual barcodes, yields better classification performance and is therefore a preferred approach when conducting similar experiments.