Classification of benign and malignant breast masses based on shape and texture features in sonography images

The purpose of this research was evaluating novel shape and texture feature' efficiency in classification of benign and malignant breast masses in sonography images. First, mass regions were extracted from the region of interest (ROI) sub-image by implementing a new hybrid segmentation approach based on level set algorithms. Then two left and right side areas of the masses are elicited. After that, six features (Eccentricity_feature, Solidity_feature, DeferenceArea_Hull_Rectangular, DeferenceArea_Mass_Rectangular, Cross-correlation-left and Cross-correlation-right) based on shape, texture and region characteristics of the masses were extracted for further classification. Finally a support vector machine (SVM) classifier was utilized to classify breast masses. The leave-one-case-out protocol was utilized on a database of eighty pathologically-proven breast sonographic images of patients (forty-seven benign cases and thirty-three malignant cases) to evaluate our method. The classification results showed an overall accuracy of 95.00%, sensitivity of 90.91%, specificity of 97.87%, positive predictive value of 96.77%, negative predictive value of 93.88%, and Matthew's correlation coefficient of 89.71%. The experimental results declare that our proposed method is actually a beneficial tool for the diagnosis of the breast cancer and can provide a second opinion for a physician's decision or can be used for the medicine training especially when coupled with other modalities.