Automatic masking in multivariate image analysis using support vector machines

A new masking method for Multivariate Image Analysis (MIA) is proposed. By interpreting the masking process in MIA as a classification problem it is possible to find masks automatically using any classification method and it is shown that Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are a good candidate for this purpose. An easy to use, iterative mask-building scheme, based on SVMs, is presented and used to find multidimensional masks for selected features …