Automatic classification of intracardiac tumor and thrombi in echocardiography based on sparse representation

Identification of intracardiac masses in echocardiograms is one important task in cardiac disease diagnosis. To improve diagnosis accuracy, a novel fully automatic classification method based on the sparse representation is proposed to distinguish intracardiac tumor and thrombi in echocardiography. First, a region of interest is cropped to define the mass area. Then, a unique globally denoising method is employed to remove the speckle and preserve the anatomical structure. Subsequently, the contour of the mass and its connected atrial wall are described by the K-singular value decomposition and a modified active contour model. Finally, the motion, the boundary as well as the texture features are processed by a sparse representation classifier to distinguish two masses. Ninety-seven clinical echocardiogram sequences are collected to assess the effectiveness. Compared with other state-of-the-art classifiers, our proposed method demonstrates the best performance by achieving an accuracy of 96.91%, a sensitivity of 100%, and a specificity of 93.02%. It explicates that our method is capable of classifying intracardiac tumors and thrombi in echocardiography, potentially to assist the cardiologists in the clinical practice.