scholarly journals Comparison of Three Segmentation Methods for Breast Ultrasound Images based on Level Set and Morphological Operations

Author(s):  
Dewi Putrie Lestari ◽  
Sarifuddin Madenda ◽  
Ernastuti Ernastuti ◽  
Eri Prasetyo Wibowo

Breast cancer is one of the major causes of death among women all over the world. The most frequently used diagnosis tool to detect breast cancer is ultrasound. However, to segment the breast ultrasound images is a difficult thing. Some studies show that the active contour models have been proved to be the most successful methods for medical image segmentation. The level set method is a class of curve evolution methods based on the geometric active contour model. Morphological operation describes a range of image processing technique that deal with the shape of features in an image. Morphological operations are applied to remove imperfections that introduced during segmentation. In this paper, we have evaluated three level set methods that combined with morphological operations to segment the breast lesions. The level set methods that used in our research are the Chan Vese (C-V) model, the Selective Binary and Gaussian Filtering Regularized Level Set (SBGFRLS) model and the Distance Regularized Level Set Evolution (DRLSE) model. Furthermore, to evaluate the method, we compared the segmented breast lesion that obtained by each method with the lesion that obtained manually by radiologists. The evaluation is done by four metrics: Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC), True-Positive Ratio (TPR), True-Negative Ratio (TNR), and Accuracy (ACC). Our experimental results with 30 breast ultrasound images showed that the C-V model that combined with morphological operations have better performance than the other two methods according to mean value of DSC metrics.

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaoyan Shen ◽  
He Ma ◽  
Ruibo Liu ◽  
Hong Li ◽  
Jiachuan He ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Breast cancer is one of the most serious diseases threatening women’s health. Early screening based on ultrasound can help to detect and treat tumours in the early stage. However, due to the lack of radiologists with professional skills, ultrasound-based breast cancer screening has not been widely used in rural areas. Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) technology can effectively alleviate this problem. Since breast ultrasound (BUS) images have low resolution and speckle noise, lesion segmentation, which is an important step in CAD systems, is challenging. Results Two datasets were used for evaluation. Dataset A comprises 500 BUS images from local hospitals, while dataset B comprises 205 open-source BUS images. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperformed its related classic segmentation methods and the state-of-the-art deep learning model RDAU-NET. Its accuracy (Acc), Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and Jaccard index (JI) reached 96.25%, 78.4% and 65.34% on dataset A, and its Acc, DSC and sensitivity reached 97.96%, 86.25% and 88.79% on dataset B, respectively. Conclusions We proposed an adaptive morphological snake based on marked watershed (AMSMW) algorithm for BUS image segmentation. It was proven to be robust, efficient and effective. In addition, it was found to be more sensitive to malignant lesions than benign lesions. Methods The proposed method consists of two steps. In the first step, contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) and a side window filter (SWF) are used to preprocess BUS images. Lesion contours can be effectively highlighted, and the influence of noise can be eliminated to a great extent. In the second step, we propose adaptive morphological snake (AMS). It can adjust the working parameters adaptively according to the size of the lesion. Its segmentation results are combined with those of the morphological method. Then, we determine the marked area and obtain candidate contours with a marked watershed (MW). Finally, the best lesion contour is chosen by the maximum average radial derivative (ARD).


2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammed M. Abdelsamea ◽  
Giorgio Gnecco ◽  
Mohamed Medhat Gaber ◽  
Eyad Elyan

Most Active Contour Models (ACMs) deal with the image segmentation problem as a functional optimization problem, as they work on dividing an image into several regions by optimizing a suitable functional. Among ACMs, variational level set methods have been used to build an active contour with the aim of modeling arbitrarily complex shapes. Moreover, they can handle also topological changes of the contours. Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs) have attracted the attention of many computer vision scientists, particularly in modeling an active contour based on the idea of utilizing the prototypes (weights) of a SOM to control the evolution of the contour. SOM-based models have been proposed in general with the aim of exploiting the specific ability of SOMs to learn the edge-map information via their topology preservation property and overcoming some drawbacks of other ACMs, such as trapping into local minima of the image energy functional to be minimized in such models. In this survey, we illustrate the main concepts of variational level set-based ACMs, SOM-based ACMs, and their relationship and review in a comprehensive fashion the development of their state-of-the-art models from a machine learning perspective, with a focus on their strengths and weaknesses.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. J. Hemalatha ◽  
V. Vijaybaskar ◽  
T. R. Thamizhvani

Active contour methods are widely used for medical image segmentation. Using level set algorithms the applications of active contour methods have become flexible and convenient. This paper describes the evaluation of the performance of the active contour models using performance metrics and statistical analysis. We have implemented five different methods for segmenting the synovial region in arthritis affected ultrasound image. A comparative analysis between the methods of segmentation was performed and the best segmentation method was identified using similarity criteria, standard error, and F-test. For further analysis, classification of the segmentation techniques using support vector machine (SVM) classifier is performed to determine the absolute method for synovial region detection. With these results, localized region based active contour named Lankton method is defined to be the best segmentation method.


Diagnostics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (10) ◽  
pp. 1870
Author(s):  
Yaghoub Pourasad ◽  
Esmaeil Zarouri ◽  
Mohammad Salemizadeh Parizi ◽  
Amin Salih Mohammed

Breast cancer is one of the main causes of death among women worldwide. Early detection of this disease helps reduce the number of premature deaths. This research aims to design a method for identifying and diagnosing breast tumors based on ultrasound images. For this purpose, six techniques have been performed to detect and segment ultrasound images. Features of images are extracted using the fractal method. Moreover, k-nearest neighbor, support vector machine, decision tree, and Naïve Bayes classification techniques are used to classify images. Then, the convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture is designed to classify breast cancer based on ultrasound images directly. The presented model obtains the accuracy of the training set to 99.8%. Regarding the test results, this diagnosis validation is associated with 88.5% sensitivity. Based on the findings of this study, it can be concluded that the proposed high-potential CNN algorithm can be used to diagnose breast cancer from ultrasound images. The second presented CNN model can identify the original location of the tumor. The results show 92% of the images in the high-performance region with an AUC above 0.6. The proposed model can identify the tumor’s location and volume by morphological operations as a post-processing algorithm. These findings can also be used to monitor patients and prevent the growth of the infected area.


Author(s):  
Satya Praksh Sahu ◽  
Bhawna Kamble

Lung segmentation is the initial step for detection and diagnosis for lung-related abnormalities and disease. In CAD system for lung cancer, this step traces the boundary for the pulmonary region from thorax in CT images. It decreases the overhead for a further step in CAD system by reducing the space for finding the ROIs. The major issue and challenging task for the segmentation is the inclusion of juxtapleural nodules in the segmented lungs. The chapter attempts 3D lung segmentation of CT images using active contour and morphological operations. The major steps in the proposed approach contain: preprocessing through various techniques, Otsu's thresholding for the binarizing the image; morphological operations are applied for elimination of undesired region and, finally, active contour for the segmentation of the lungs in 3D. For experiment, 10 subjects are taken from the public dataset of LIDC-IDRI. The proposed method achieved accuracies 0.979 Jaccard's similarity index value, 0.989 Dice similarity coefficient, and 0.073 volume overlap error when compared to ground truth.


2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Huiyan Jiang ◽  
Hanqing Tan ◽  
Hiroshi Fujita

This paper proposes a novel semiautomatic method to extract the pancreas from abdominal CT images. Traditional level set and region growing methods that request locating initial contour near the final boundary of object have problem of leakage to nearby tissues of pancreas region. The proposed method consists of a customized fast-marching level set method which generates an optimal initial pancreas region to solve the problem that the level set method is sensitive to the initial contour location and a modified distance regularized level set method which extracts accurate pancreas. The novelty in our method is the proper selection and combination of level set methods, furthermore an energy-decrement algorithm and an energy-tune algorithm are proposed to reduce the negative impact of bonding force caused by connected tissue whose intensity is similar with pancreas. As a result, our method overcomes the shortages of oversegmentation at weak boundary and can accurately extract pancreas from CT images. The proposed method is compared to other five state-of-the-art medical image segmentation methods based on a CT image dataset which contains abdominal images from 10 patients. The evaluated results demonstrate that our method outperforms other methods by achieving higher accuracy and making less false segmentation in pancreas extraction.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaoyan Shen ◽  
He Ma ◽  
Ruibo Liu ◽  
Hong Li ◽  
Jiachuan He ◽  
...  

Abstract Background: Breast cancer is one of the most serious diseases threatening women’s health. Early screening based on ultrasound can help to detect and treat tumors in early stage. However, due to the lack of radiologists with professional skills, ultrasound based breast cancer screening has not been widely used in rural area. Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) technology can effectively alleviates this problem. Since Breast Ultrasound (BUS) images have low resolution and speckle noise, lesion segmentation, which is an important step in CAD system, is challenging.Results: Two datasets were used for evaluation. Dataset A comprises 500 BUS images from local hospitals, while dataset B comprises 205 BUS images from open source. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperformed its related classic segmentation methods and the state-of-the-art deep learning model, RDAU–NET. And its’ Accuracy(Acc), Dice efficient(DSC) and Jaccard Index(JI) reached 96.25%, 78.4% and 65.34% on dataset A, and ACC, DC and Sen reached 97.96%, 86.25% and 88.79% on dataset B.Conclusions: We proposed an adaptive morphology snake based on marked watershed(AMSMW) algorithm for BUS images segmentation. It was proven to be robust, efficient and effective. In addition, it was found to be more sensitive to malignant lesions than benign lesions. What’s more, since the Rectangular Region of Interest(RROI) in the proposed method is drawn manually, we will consider adding deep learning network to automatically identify RROI, and completely liberate the hands of radiologists.Methods: The proposed method consists of two main steps. In the first step, we used Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization(CLAHE) and Side Window Filter(SWF) to preprocess BUS images. Therefore, lesion contours can be effectively highlighted and the influence of noise can be eliminated to a great extent. In the second step, we proposed adaptative morphology snake(AMS) as an embedded segmentation function of AMSMW. It can adjust working parameters adaptively, according to different lesions’ size. By combining segmentation results of AMS with marker region obtained by morphological method, we got the marker region of marked watershed (MW). Finally, we obtained candidate contours by MW. And the best lesion contour was chosen by maximum Average Radial Derivative(ARD).


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xianyu Zhang ◽  
Hui Li ◽  
Chaoyun Wang ◽  
Wen Cheng ◽  
Yuntao Zhu ◽  
...  

Background: Breast ultrasound is the first choice for breast tumor diagnosis in China, but the Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System (BI-RADS) categorization routinely used in the clinic often leads to unnecessary biopsy. Radiologists have no ability to predict molecular subtypes with important pathological information that can guide clinical treatment.Materials and Methods: This retrospective study collected breast ultrasound images from two hospitals and formed training, test and external test sets after strict selection, which included 2,822, 707, and 210 ultrasound images, respectively. An optimized deep learning model (DLM) was constructed with the training set, and the performance was verified in both the test set and the external test set. Diagnostic results were compared with the BI-RADS categorization determined by radiologists. We divided breast cancer into different molecular subtypes according to hormone receptor (HR) and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) expression. The ability to predict molecular subtypes using the DLM was confirmed in the test set.Results: In the test set, with pathological results as the gold standard, the accuracy, sensitivity and specificity were 85.6, 98.7, and 63.1%, respectively, according to the BI-RADS categorization. The same set achieved an accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of 89.7, 91.3, and 86.9%, respectively, when using the DLM. For the test set, the area under the curve (AUC) was 0.96. For the external test set, the AUC was 0.90. The diagnostic accuracy was 92.86% with the DLM in BI-RADS 4a patients. Approximately 70.76% of the cases were judged as benign tumors. Unnecessary biopsy was theoretically reduced by 67.86%. However, the false negative rate was 10.4%. A good prediction effect was shown for the molecular subtypes of breast cancer with the DLM. The AUC were 0.864, 0.811, and 0.837 for the triple-negative subtype, HER2 (+) subtype and HR (+) subtype predictions, respectively.Conclusion: This study showed that the DLM was highly accurate in recognizing breast tumors from ultrasound images. Thus, the DLM can greatly reduce the incidence of unnecessary biopsy, especially for patients with BI-RADS 4a. In addition, the predictive ability of this model for molecular subtypes was satisfactory,which has specific clinical application value.


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