New Fully Automated Method for Segmentation of Breast Lesions on Ultrasound Based on Texture Analysis

The study described here explored a fully automatic segmentation approach based on texture analysis for breast lesions on ultrasound images. The proposed method involves two main stages: (i) In lesion region detection, the original gray-scale image is transformed into a texture domain based on log-Gabor filters. Local texture patterns are then extracted from overlapping lattices that are further classified by a linear discriminant analysis classifier to distinguish between the "normal tissue" and "breast lesion" classes. Next, an incremental method based on the average radial derivative function reveals the region with the highest probability of being a lesion. (ii) In lesion delineation, using the detected region and the pre-processed ultrasound image, an iterative thresholding procedure based on the average radial derivative function is performed to determine the final lesion contour. The experiments are carried out on a data set of 544 breast ultrasound images (including cysts, benign solid masses and malignant lesions) acquired with three distinct ultrasound machines. In terms of the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, the one-way analysis of variance test (α=0.05) indicates that the proposed approach significantly outperforms two published fully automatic methods (p<0.001), for which the areas under the curve are 0.91, 0.82 and 0.63, respectively. Hence, these results suggest that the log-Gabor domain improves the discrimination power of texture features to accurately segment breast lesions. In addition, the proposed approach can potentially be used for automated computer diagnosis purposes to assist physicians in detection and classification of breast masses.