Breast tissue characterization using FARMA modeling of ultrasonic RF echo

A number of empirical and analytical studies demonstrated that the ultrasound RF echo reflected from tissue exhibits 1/f characteristics. In this paper, we propose to model 1/f characteristics of the ultrasonic RF echo by a novel parsimonious model, namely the fractional differencing auto regressive moving average (FARMA) process, and evaluated diagnostic value of model parameters for breast cancer malignancy differentiation. FARMA model captures the fractal and long term correlated nature of the backscattered speckle texture and facilitates robust efficient estimation of fractal parameters. In our study, in addition to the computer generated FARMA model parameters, we included patient age and radiologist's prebiopsy level of suspicion (LOS) as potential indicators of malignant and benign masses. We evaluated the performance of the proposed set of features using various classifiers and training methods using 120 in vivo breast images. Our study shows that the area under the receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve of FARMA model parameters alone is superior to the area under the ROC curve of the radiologist's prebiopsy LOS. The area under the ROC curve of the three sets of features yields a value of 0.87, with a confidence interval of [0.85, 0.89], at a significance level of 0.05. Our results suggest that the proposed method of ultrasound RF echo model leads to parameters that can differentiate breast tumors with a relatively high precision. This set of RF echo features can be incorporated into a comprehensive computer-aided diagnostic system to aid physicians in breast cancer diagnosis.