Detection of skin cancer by classification of Raman spectra

Skin lesion classification based on in vitro Raman spectroscopy is approached using a nonlinear neural network classifier. The classification framework is probabilistic and highly automated. The framework includes a feature extraction for Raman spectra and a fully adaptive and robust feedforward neural network classifier. Moreover, classification rules learned by the neural network may be extracted and evaluated for reproducibility, making it possible to explain the class assignment. The classification performance for the present data set, involving 222 cases and five lesion types, was 80.5%+/-5.3% correct classification of malignant melanoma, which is similar to that of trained dermatologists based on visual inspection. The skin cancer basal cell carcinoma has a classification rate of 95.8%+/-2.7%, which is excellent. The overall classification rate of skin lesions is 94.8%+/-3.0%. Spectral regions, which are important for network classification, are demonstrated to reproduce. Small distinctive bands in the spectrum, corresponding to specific lipids and proteins, are shown to hold the discriminating information which the network uses to diagnose skin lesions.     

Computer-aided breast cancer detection and diagnosis of massesusing difference of Gaussians and derivative-based feature saliency

A new model-based vision (MBV) algorithm is developed to find regions of interest (ROI's) corresponding to masses in digitized mammograms and to classify the masses as malignant/benign. The MBV algorithm is comprised of 5 modules to structurally identify suspicious ROI's, eliminate false positives, and classify the remaining as malignant or benign. The focus of attention module uses a difference of Gaussians (DoG) filter to highlight suspicious regions in the mammogram. The index module uses tests to reduce the number of nonmalignant regions from 8.39 to 2.36 per full breast image. Size, shape, contrast, and Laws texture features are used to develop the prediction module's mass models. Derivative-based feature saliency techniques are used to determine the best features for classification. Nine features are chosen to define the malignant/benign models. The feature extraction module obtains these features from all suspicious ROI's. The matching module classifies the regions using a multilayer perceptron neural network architecture to obtain an overall classification accuracy of 100% for the segmented malignant masses with a false-positive rate of 1.8 per full breast image. This system has a sensitivity of 92% for locating malignant ROI's. The database contains 272 images (12 b, 100 μm) with 36 malignant and 53 benign mass images. The results demonstrate that the MBV approach provides a structured order of integrating complex stages into a system for radiologists     

Analysis of tumor vascularity using three-dimensional power Doppler ultrasound images

Tumor vascularity is an important factor that has been shown to correlate with tumor malignancy and was demonstrated as a prognostic indicator for a wide range of cancers. Three-dimensional (3-D) power Doppler ultrasound (PDUS) offers a convenient tool for investigators to inspect the signals of blood flow and vascular structures in breast cancer. In this paper, a new computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system for quantifying Doppler ultrasound images based on 3-D thinning algorithm and neural network is proposed. We extracted the skeleton of blood vessels from 3-D PDUS data to facilitate the capturing of morphological changes. Nine features including vessel-to-volume ratio, number of vascular trees, length of vessels, number of branching, mean of radius, number of cycles, and three tortuosity measures, were extracted from the thinning result. Benign and malignant tumors can therefore be differentiated by a score computed by a multilayered perceptron (MLP) neural network using these features as parameters. The proposed system was tested on 221 breast tumors, including 110 benign and 111 malignant lesions. The accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative predictive values were 88.69% (196/221), 91.89% (102/111), 85.45% (94/110), 86.44% (102/118), and 91.26% (94/103), respectively. The Az value of the ROC curve was 0.94. The results demonstrate a correlation between the morphology of blood vessels and tumor malignancy, indicating that the newly proposed method can retrieves a high accuracy in the classification of benign and malignant breast tumors.     

Detection of breast masses in mammograms by density slicing and texture flow-field analysis.

We propose a method for the detection of masses in mammographic images that employs Gaussian smoothing and sub-sampling operations as preprocessing steps. The mass portions are segmented by establishing intensity links from the central portions of masses into the surrounding areas. We introduce methods for analyzing oriented flow-like textural information in mammograms. Features based on flow orientation in adaptive ribbons of pixels across the margins of masses are proposed to classify the regions detected as true mass regions or false-positives (FPs). The methods yielded a mass versus normal tissue classification accuracy represented as an area (Az) of 0.87 under the receiver operating characteristics (ROCs) curve with a dataset of 56 images including 30 benign disease, 13 malignant disease, and 13 normal cases selected from the mini Mammographic Image Analysis Society database. A sensitivity of 81% was achieved at 2.2 FPs/image. Malignant tumor versus normal tissue classification resulted in a higher Az value of 0.9 under the ROC curve using only the 13 malignant and 13 normal cases with a sensitivity of 85% at 2.45 FPs/image. The mass detection algorithm could detect all the 13 malignant tumors successfully, but achieved a success rate of only 63% (19/30) in detecting the benign masses. The mass regions that were successfully segmented were further classified as benign or malignant disease by computing five texture features based on gray-level co-occurrence matrices (GCMs) and using the features in a logistic regression method. The features were computed using adaptive ribbons of pixels across the boundaries of the masses. Benign versus malignant classification using the GCM-based texture features resulted in Az = 0.79 with 19 benign and 13 malignant cases.     

基于支持向量机的超声乳腺肿瘤图像计算机辅助诊断系统

支持向量机与其他16种常见分类器相比具有优异的分类性能.本文提出一个基于支持向量机的超声乳腺肿瘤图像计算机辅助诊断系统.该系统提取了乳腺肿瘤图像归一化自相关系数、均方根系数、紧凑度等共26个纹理和几何特征.这些特征不但反映乳腺良性肿瘤和恶性肿瘤本质的区别,还考虑到医学超声图像为相干图像的特点.实验结果表明,该系统诊断精确度为93.03%,敏感性为94.30%,特殊性为91.59%,错误正比率92.80%,错误负比率为93.33%,接受特性曲线面积AUC为0.9669,性能优于较有影响的文献[1]提出的方案.     

An integrated computer supported acquisition, handling, and characterization system for pigmented skin lesions in dermatological images.

This paper describes an integrated prototype computer-based system for the characterization of skin digital images. The first stage includes an image acquisition arrangement designed for capturing skin images, under reproducible conditions. The system processes the captured images and performs unsupervised image segmentation and image registration utilizing an efficient algorithm based on the log-polar transform of the images' Fourier spectrum. Border- and color-based features, extracted from the digital images of skin lesions, were used to construct a classification module for the recognition of malignant melanoma versus dysplastic nevus. Different methods, drawn from the fields of artificial intelligence (neural networks) and statistical modeling (discriminant analysis), were used in order to find the best classification rules and to compare the results of different approaches to the problem.     

Medical Big Data Analysis with Attention and Large Margin Loss Model for Skin Lesion Application

Due to melanoma is one of the skin cancers with the highest mortality rate and have a large amount of data during the collection and diagnosis, there is an urgent need to improve the diagnostic efficiency and accuracy. However, there remain problems in analyzing medical big data for skin lesion application, such as the intra-class variation and inter-class similarity in skin lesion images and the lacks of ability to focus on the lesion area affecting the classification results of the model. To address these dilemmas, in this paper, we proposed a novel machine learning-based approach that builds on top of DenseNet. It combines the attention mechanism and large margin loss to enhance the classification accuracy in terms of intra-class compactness and inter-class separability. We evaluated our model on ISIC 2017 (International Skin Imaging Collaboration) dataset, which has achieved 92% of Mean AUC. The experimental results show the effectiveness of our solution outperforms the state-of-the-art significantly in classify skin lesion and can accurately classify malignant melanoma on medical images.

     

基于语义属性的肺结节良恶性分类

现有肺结节良恶性计算机辅助诊断的依据通常为肺部CT图像的底层特征,而临床医生的诊断依据为高级语义特征.为克服这种图像底层特征和高级语义特征之间的不一致性,提出一种基于语义属性的肺结节良恶性判别方法.首先,利用阈值概率图方法提取肺结节图像;其次,一方面提取肺结节图像的形状、灰度、纹理、大小和位置等底层特征,组成样本特征集.另一方面,根据专家对肺结节属性的标注,提取结节属性集;然后,根据特征集和属性集建立属性预测模型,实现两者之间的映射;最后,利用预测的属性进行肺结节的良恶性分类.LIDC数据库上的实验结果表明所提方法具有较高的分类精度和AUC值.     

彩色多普勒超声在乳腺肿瘤良恶性鉴别诊断中的价值

提取乳腺肿瘤多普勒超声图像的肿瘤血管区域,研究肿瘤内血流信号的丰富程度与肿瘤良恶性的关系,以及肿瘤的大小与血流信号检出率的关系。结合Hill-Climbing算法和K-means聚类算法对乳腺肿瘤彩色多普勒超卢图像进行分割,提取肿瘤血管区域。然后根据成像原卵和临』术知以没定三条准则统计肿瘤血管数日,以此判别乳腺肿瘤的良恶性。实验结果表明恶性肿瘤的血管丰富化程度高于良性,当选取肿瘤眦符数目临界值为5时,判别结果达到了70．16％。肿瘤内血管的丰富程度与肿瘤的尺寸成一定的正相关关系,即肿瘤越大,其内部血管越多．因此,血管的丰富程度能够反映良恶性乳腺肿瘤的病变情况,彩色多普勒超声对于鉴别乳腺肿瘤的良恶性是有效的。     

基于乳腺肿瘤超声图像的灰色理论识别

乳腺肿瘤边界特征量如似圆度,面积比率,边界粗糙度、长宽比等,是鉴别良、恶性肿瘤的重要特征。利用灰色理论中的待诊病例与良性、恶性肿瘤的关联度的阀值,即可判断出是良性还是恶性肿瘤。实验表明,在76幅待诊病例中,良性肿瘤识别正确率达到87.5%,恶性肿瘤识别正确率达到75%。该方法较为有效地识别良性、恶性乳腺肿瘤。     

Detection of basal cell carcinoma using electrical impedance and neural networks

Variations in electrical impedance over frequency might be used to distinguish basal cell carcinoma (BCC) from benign skin lesions, although the patterns that separate the two are nonobvious. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) may be good pattern classifiers for this application. A preliminary study to show the potential of neural networks to distinguish benign from malignant skin lesions using electrical impedance is presented. Electrical impedance was measured in vivo from 1 kHz to 1 MHz at five virtual depths on 18 BCC and 16 benign or premalignant lesions. A feed-forward neural network was trained using back propagation to classify these lesions. Two methods of preprocessing were used to account for the impedance of normal skin and the size of the lesion, one based on estimating the impedance of the lesion relative to adjacent normal skin and one based on estimating the impedance of the lesion independent of size or surrounding normal skin. Neural networks were able to classify measurements in a test set with 100% accuracy for the first preprocessing technique and 85% accuracy for the second. These results indicate electrical impedance may be a promising clinical diagnostic tool for basal cell carcinoma or other forms of skin cancer.     

Integrating PSONN and Boltzmann function for feature selection and classification of lymph nodes in ultrasound images

Lymph nodes (LNs), part of the lymphatic system, are important in the proper functioning of the immune system. LN metastasis is an important index for staging malignant tumors. The present study proposes a system that classifies lymph nodes according to pathological change from ultrasound (US) images. Features are selected and extracted from the US images. A feature selection method that integrates the particle swarm optimization neural network (PSONN) with the Boltzmann function is proposed to select significant features. A multi-class support vector machine (SVM) is adopted to classify diseases of the LN in the region of interests (ROIs) of US images into six categories. The experimental results show that the proposed approach decreases the number of selected features and that its classification is highly accurate.     

An approach to automated detection of tumors in mammograms

An automated system for detecting and classifying particular types of tumors in digitized mammograms is described. The analysis of mammograms is performed in two stages. First, the system identifies pixel groupings that may correspond to tumors. Next, detected pixel groupings are subjected to classification. The essence of the first processing stage is multiresolution image processing based on fuzzy pyramid linking. The second stage uses a classification hierarchy to identify benign and malignant tumors. Each level of the hierarchy uses deterministic or Bayes classifiers and a particular measurement. The measurements pertain to shape and intensity characteristics of particular types of tumors. The classification hierarchy is organized in such a way that the simplest measurements are used at the top, with the system stepping through the hierarchy only when it cannot classify the detected pixel groupings with certainty.     

Computer-aided diagnostic scheme for distinction between benign and malignant nodules in thoracic low-dose CT by use of massive training artificial neural network

Low-dose helical computed tomography (LDCT) is being applied as a modality for lung cancer screening. It may be difficult, however, for radiologists to distinguish malignant from benign nodules in LDCT. Our purpose in this study was to develop a computer-aided diagnostic (CAD) scheme for distinction between benign and malignant nodules in LDCT scans by use of a massive training artificial neural network (MTANN). The MTANN is a trainable, highly nonlinear filter based on an artificial neural network. To distinguish malignant nodules from six different types of benign nodules, we developed multiple MTANNs (multi-MTANN) consisting of six expert MTANNs that are arranged in parallel. Each of the MTANNs was trained by use of input CT images and teaching images containing the estimate of the distribution for the "likelihood of being a malignant nodule," i.e., the teaching image for a malignant nodule contains a two-dimensional Gaussian distribution and that for a benign nodule contains zero. Each MTANN was trained independently with ten typical malignant nodules and ten benign nodules from each of the six types. The outputs of the six MTANNs were combined by use of an integration ANN such that the six types of benign nodules could be distinguished from malignant nodules. After training of the integration ANN, our scheme provided a value related to the "likelihood of malignancy" of a nodule, i.e., a higher value indicates a malignant nodule, and a lower value indicates a benign nodule. Our database consisted of 76 primary lung cancers in 73 patients and 413 benign nodules in 342 patients, which were obtained from a lung cancer screening program on 7847 screenees with LDCT for three years in Nagano, Japan. The performance of our scheme for distinction between benign and malignant nodules was evaluated by use of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis. Our scheme achieved an Az (area under the ROC curve) value of 0.882 in a round-robin test. Our scheme correctly identified 100% (76/76) of malignant nodules as malignant, whereas 48% (200/413) of benign nodules were identified correctly as benign. Therefore, our scheme may be useful in assisting radiologists in the diagnosis of lung nodules in LDCT.     

Mass classification of mammograms using fractal dimensions and statistical features

For classification of tumors in mammography, the major features are extracted from the segmented tumor. However, some details of the tumor margin, such as the spiculated parts, are eliminated in the segmentation step. The current study suggests a new approach for extracting the spiculated parts and tumor core. The proposed method segments the tumor by assessing the similarity of the pixels of the tumor core and dissimilarity of the spiculated parts. Then, the spiculated parts and the tumor core are combined to create the final segmentation. Next, the statistical features and fractal dimensions are extracted from the tumor. The fractal dimension is a measure of complexity of the tumor shape that is effective for discriminating between benign and malignant tumors. The simulation results show that the proposed method is more suitable than other methods. The area under the ROC curve and the accuracy of the proposed method on mini-MIAS were 0.9627 and 89.66% and for DDSM were 0.9777 and 93.50%, respectively. The results confirm the efficiency of the proposed method for extracting the mass core and spiculated parts. They also show that use of the fractal dimension increases the accuracy of classification and complements the other shape features.

     

Computer-aided diagnosis of solid breast nodules: use of an artificial neural network based on multiple sonographic features

A computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) algorithm identifying breast nodule malignancy using multiple ultrasonography (US) features and artificial neural network (ANN) classifier was developed from a database of 584 histologically confirmed cases containing 300 benign and 284 malignant breast nodules. The features determining whether a breast nodule is benign or malignant were extracted from US images through digital image processing with a relatively simple segmentation algorithm applied to the manually preselected region of interest. An ANN then distinguished malignant nodules in US images based on five morphological features representing the shape, edge characteristics, and darkness of a nodule. The structure of ANN was selected using k-fold cross-validation method with k = 10. The ANN trained with randomly selected half of breast nodule images showed the normalized area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.95. With the trained ANN, 53.3% of biopsies on benign nodules can be avoided with 99.3% sensitivity. Performance of the developed classifier was reexamined with new US mass images in the generalized patient population of total 266 (167 benign and 99 malignant) cases. The developed CAD algorithm has the potential to increase the specificity of US for characterization of breast lesions.     

Texture analysis of aggressive and nonaggressive lung tumor CE CT images

This paper presents the potential for fractal analysis of time sequence contrast-enhanced (CE) computed tomography (CT) images to differentiate between aggressive and nonaggressive malignant lung tumors (i.e., high and low metabolic tumors). The aim is to enhance CT tumor staging prediction accuracy through identifying malignant aggressiveness of lung tumors. As branching of blood vessels can be considered a fractal process, the research examines vascularized tumor regions that exhibit strong fractal characteristics. The analysis is performed after injecting 15 patients with a contrast agent and transforming at least 11 time sequence CE CT images from each patient to the fractal dimension and determining corresponding lacunarity. The fractal texture features were averaged over the tumor region and quantitative classification showed up to 83.3% accuracy in distinction between advanced (aggressive) and early-stage (nonaggressive) malignant tumors. Also, it showed strong correlation with corresponding lung tumor stage and standardized tumor uptake value of fluoro deoxyglucose as determined by positron emission tomography. These results indicate that fractal analysis of time sequence CE CT images of malignant lung tumors could provide additional information about likely tumor aggression that could potentially impact on clinical management decisions in choosing the appropriate treatment procedure.     

Skin cancer identification using multifrequency electrical impedance--a potential screening tool

Electrical bio-impedance can be used to assess skin cancers and other cutaneous lesions. The aim of this study was to distinguish skin cancer from benign nevi using multifrequency impedance spectra. Electrical impedance spectra of about 100 skin cancers and 511 benign nevi were measured. Impedance of reference skin was measured ipsi-laterally to the lesions. The impedance relation between lesion and reference skin was used to distinguish the cancers from the nevi. It was found that it is possible to separate malignant melanoma from benign nevi with 75% specificity at 100% sensitivity, and to distinguish nonmelanoma skin cancer from benign nevi with 87% specificity at 100% sensitivity. The power of skin cancer detection using electrical impedance is as good as, or better than, conventional visual screening made by general practitioners.     

A study on several machine-learning methods for classification of malignant and benign clustered microcalcifications

In this paper, we investigate several state-of-the-art machine-learning methods for automated classification of clustered microcalcifications (MCs). The classifier is part of a computer-aided diagnosis (CADx) scheme that is aimed to assisting radiologists in making more accurate diagnoses of breast cancer on mammograms. The methods we considered were: support vector machine (SVM), kernel Fisher discriminant (KFD), relevance vector machine (RVM), and committee machines (ensemble averaging and AdaBoost), of which most have been developed recently in statistical learning theory. We formulated differentiation of malignant from benign MCs as a supervised learning problem, and applied these learning methods to develop the classification algorithm. As input, these methods used image features automatically extracted from clustered MCs. We tested these methods using a database of 697 clinical mammograms from 386 cases, which included a wide spectrum of difficult-to-classify cases. We analyzed the distribution of the cases in this database using the multidimensional scaling technique, which reveals that in the feature space the malignant cases are not trivially separable from the benign ones. We used receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis to evaluate and to compare classification performance by the different methods. In addition, we also investigated how to combine information from multiple-view mammograms of the same case so that the best decision can be made by a classifier. In our experiments, the kernel-based methods (i.e., SVM, KFD, and RVM) yielded the best performance (Az = 0.85, SVM), significantly outperforming a well-established, clinically-proven CADx approach that is based on neural network (Az = 0.80).     

Classification of malignant and benign masses based on hybrid ART2LDA approach

A new type of classifier combining an unsupervised and a supervised model was designed and applied to classification of malignant and benign masses on mammograms. The unsupervised model was based on an adaptive resonance theory (ART2) network which clustered the masses into a number of separate classes. The classes were divided into two types: one containing only malignant masses and the other containing a mix of malignant and benign masses. The masses from the malignant classes were classified by ART2. The masses from the mixed classes were input to a supervised linear discriminant classifier (LDA). In this way, some malignant masses were separated and classified by ART2 and the less distinguishable benign and malignant masses were classified by LDA. For the evaluation of classifier performance, 348 regions of interest (ROI's) containing biopsy proven masses (169 benign and 179 malignant) were used. Ten different partitions of training and test groups were randomly generated using an average of 73% of ROI's for training and 27% for testing. Classifier design, including feature selection and weight optimization, was performed with the training group. The test group was kept independent of the training group. The performance of the hybrid classifier was compared to that of an LDA classifier alone and a backpropagation neural network (BPN). Receiver operating characteristics (ROC) analysis was used to evaluate the accuracy of the classifiers. The average area under the ROC curve (A(z)) for the hybrid classifier was 0.81 as compared to 0.78 for the LDA and 0.80 for the BPN. The partial areas above a true positive fraction of 0.9 were 0.34, 0.27 and 0.31 for the hybrid, the LDA and the BPN classifier, respectively. These results indicate that the hybrid classifier is a promising approach for improving the accuracy of classification in CAD applications.