Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Ultrasound Imaging
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Breast cancer has become a significant health problem worldwide. In order to prevent the
increase of deaths caused by breast cancer, early diagnosis of the disease has been very effective.
Detected early, breast cancer is easier to treat, with fewer risks and reduces mortality by 25%[1].
This early detection can be achieved by subjecting women at risk (mainly postmenopausal
women) to a mammography every two years, since it takes about five years for a breast tumor to
reach 1 mm, two years longer to reach 5mm and one or two years to measure 2 cm, large enough
to detect by palpation. Now adays, X-Ray mammography, ultrasound, and magnetic resonance
imaging (MRI) are imaging modalities routinely used to screen for breast cancer. It is well
known that there is no technology at present, which is capable of curing cancer. But, it is well
known that early detection of cancer can aid in recovery and prolong patient life. A major reason
for these errors is due to the fact that radiologists depend on visual inspection. During manual
screening of a large number of mammograms, radiologists may get easily worn out, missing out
vital clues while studying the scans. As yet, there is no definitive literature which focuses on an
elaborate discussion on the feature extraction, feature selection and classification methodologies
used in breast cancer detection.
Increasing risk of developing breast cancer includes early menarchy, delayed menopause,
obesity, infertile mothers, contraceptives, consuming alcohol and certain inherited genetic
mutation. Despite advances in other breast imaging modalities, including ultrasound and
magnetic resonance imaging, mammography is still a method of choice. However the detection
of small malignancies is especially difficult in younger women who tend to present denser breast
tissues. Biopsy is applied for the most accurate diagnosis. However, it is an aggressive and highcost procedure with some risk and causes inconvenience to the patient.
Mammography is the best available inspection facility to detect the symptoms of breast
cancer at the early stage and it can disclose information about abnormality, such as masses,
microcalcifications, bilateral asymmetry, and architectural distortion. Mammography is the
breast image taken with a special X-ray. It uses a low-dose X-ray, high-contrast, and highresolution film. For the hundreds of mammographic images scanned by a radiologist, only a few
are cancerous. While detecting abnormalities, some of them may be missed, as the detection of
suspicious and abnormal images is a recurrent mission that causes fatigue and eyestrain. Using
enhanced images and segment the suspicious area , extract features , select more accurate
features and then classify them into appropriate category are the most important steps that
computer aided detection systems should follow. However, due to low contrast and strong noise,
digital mammograms are among the most difficult medical images to analyze.
Since the calcification have high attenuation properties and small dense tissues similar to
bones, they tend to present low contrast. Thus their visual screening is difficult for physicians. As
Page 1
Feature Level Fusion for Characterization of Breast Mass using Mammogram and
Ultrasound Imaging
the above difficulties prevail in the existing methodology of mammographic image processing,
the improvement of local detail discrimination and removal of noise from the images is a
requirement.
Page 2
Feature Level Fusion for Characterization of Breast Mass using Mammogram and
Ultrasound Imaging
CHAPTER 2
BREAST CANCER
This chapter gives insight into what is cancer, breast cancer, its types, associated signs,
diagnostic methods, understanding of these is one of the fundamental requirements to carry out
the work.
2.1 Cancer
Uncontrolled multiplication of a group of cells in a particular location of the body is
called cancer. Cancer results from a series of molecular events that fundamentally alter the
normal properties of cells and the normal control systems that prevent cell overgrowth
and invasion to other tissues are disabled. The uncontrolled multiplication of cells forms extra
cells which intern may form a mass of tissue called a tumor, tumors are not cancerous always,
they can be benign or malignant.
2.1.1 Benign Tumors
These are not cancerous, can be removed and in most cases, they do not appear again.
Cells in benign tumors do not spread to other parts of the body.
Page 3
Feature Level Fusion for Characterization of Breast Mass using Mammogram and
Ultrasound Imaging
Page 4
Feature Level Fusion for Characterization of Breast Mass using Mammogram and
Ultrasound Imaging
Page 5
Feature Level Fusion for Characterization of Breast Mass using Mammogram and
Ultrasound Imaging
Page 6
Feature Level Fusion for Characterization of Breast Mass using Mammogram and
Ultrasound Imaging
(a)
(b)
Masses are with different margins like circumscribed, micro lobular, obscured,
indistinct and speculated margins and the different shapes associated with mass are
round, oval, lobular and irregular shapes. Round and oval shaped masses with smooth and
circumscribed margins indicate benign changes. However, a malignant mass usually has a
speculated, rough and blurry boundary. Fig 3.4 (a) and fig 3.4 (b) shows circumscribed and
speculated masses.
Page 7
Feature Level Fusion for Characterization of Breast Mass using Mammogram and
Ultrasound Imaging
(a)
(b)
Fig 2.4 (a) circumscribed mass with smooth margin, (b) speculated mass with
branching margins [1].
Page 8
Feature Level Fusion for Characterization of Breast Mass using Mammogram and
Ultrasound Imaging
slight asymmetries in distribution of normal parenchyma occurs frequently and that even
substantial asymmetry is seen in 3%-5% of totally normal breasts.
Bilateral asymmetry and architectural distortion are considered as indirect signs of
breast cancer. Along with the four signs of breast cancer mentioned above, there are few less
observed signs such as single dilated duct, developing density etc.
Page 9
Feature Level Fusion for Characterization of Breast Mass using Mammogram and
Ultrasound Imaging
(a)
(b)
Fig 2.5 (a) Cranio-Caudal (CC) (b) Medio Lateral Oblique (MLO) views of
mammograms [21].
2.6.2.2 Tomosysnthesis
In this method multiple images are acquired as the X-ray tube is moved in an arc
above the stationary breast and digital detector.
The total reduction dose required for imaging the entire breast being
approximately equal to the dose used for a single film-screen mammogram.
The method is benefited for women with radiographically dense breasts.
Dept. of IT, DSCE
Page 10
Feature Level Fusion for Characterization of Breast Mass using Mammogram and
Ultrasound Imaging
The less used and uncommon digital imaging techniques involves stereotactic imaging,
single energy X-ray technique and 3D digital reconstruction.
2.2.3 Ultra Sound (US) Imaging
Involves identification of pathological vascularization in the breast with
Doppler imaging.
More accurately map the extent of tumor within breast than possible with
mammography.
Contrast imaging method among the various methods under ultra sound
imaging is more beneficial.
Involves less cost than MRI.
Usually done in combination with mammography.
The other less common imaging techniques involves nuclear imaging, Positron
Emission Tomography (PET) imaging, sestamibi imaging, bioelectric imaging, optical
diffusion imaging.
2.7 Statistics
2.7.1 Statistics based on age group
Figure below shows percentage distribution of breast cancer among different age
group.
Page 11
Feature Level Fusion for Characterization of Breast Mass using Mammogram and
Ultrasound Imaging
Fig 2.7 percentage of breast cancer associated with different quadrants of breast
Page 12
Feature Level Fusion for Characterization of Breast Mass using Mammogram and
Ultrasound Imaging
CHAPTER III
CONCEPTUAL DESIGN
It is well known that there is no technology at present, which is capable of curing cancer.
But, early detection of breast cancer can aid in recovery and also prolong patient life. A major
reason for errors in reading mammograms is due to the fact that radiologists depend on visual
inspection. During manual screening of a large number of mammograms, radiologists may get
easily worn out, missing out vital clues while studying the scans. As yet, there are very less
efficient models of CAD which incorporates feature extraction, feature selection and
classification methodologies used in breast cancer detection. As double reading of mammograms
and diagnosis by imaging techniques other than mammography, such as MRI, are expensive, the
costs incurred is very high for the patients, the project proposes the development of ComputerAided Detection(CAD) and diagnosis method, by developing efficient algorithms for early
identification of breast masses with low cost mammography & ultrasound images.
3.1 Proposed System
We propose to preprocess the mammogram image, segment the suspicious mass region and
extract features before classifying it into benign or malignant. We use Contrast Limited Adaptive
Histogram Equalization(CLAHE) method for preprocessing the mammogram image before
extracting the lesion. Support vector machine (SVM) classifiers are used to classify the fused
features.
Page 13
Feature Level Fusion for Characterization of Breast Mass using Mammogram and
Ultrasound Imaging
sophisticated data structures, contains built-in editing and debugging tools, and supports objectoriented programming. MATLAB is an interactive system whose basic data element is an array
which does not need dimensioning. In this work, image processing toolbox is used implement
segmentation, Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization(CLAHE), and image
arithmetic parts of proposed algorithms. Scripts to obtain GUI and other techniques such as
Gaussian pyramid, log transformation, canny edge detection, morphological operations,
dimension measurements etc., the LabVIEW Vision Assistant is used.
Page 14
Feature Level Fusion for Characterization of Breast Mass using Mammogram and
Ultrasound Imaging
Page 15
Feature Level Fusion for Characterization of Breast Mass using Mammogram and
Ultrasound Imaging
Page 16
Feature Level Fusion for Characterization of Breast Mass using Mammogram and
Ultrasound Imaging
The features retrieved from mammogram are structural features and that from ultrasound are
functional features and they are dissimilar in terms of dimension. For fusion of features we
needed coherent dataset from both modalities which belong to a same person. Data set was
created by collecting and getting the ground truth marked images from expert radiologists trained
with those kinds of images. All images in our dataset contained only one abnormality (AD with
Page 17
Feature Level Fusion for Characterization of Breast Mass using Mammogram and
Ultrasound Imaging
spiculated mass). As discussed in previous sections both modalities will output a collection of
features. The fusion process fuses this collection of features into a single feature set.
Feature level fusion is a medium level fusion strategy which performs well, if the features are
homogenous. If the features are heterogeneous, then it requires normalization to convert them
into a range that makes them more similar. We have used three well-known normalization
methods:
Min-Max (MM)
Z-score (ZS)
Tanh (TH)
Support vector machines (SVM) are a learning tool based on modern statistical learning method
that classifies binary classes. SVM has been shown to perform better than many other
classification algorithms due to several reasons:
Thus we have used SVM classifiers to classify the fused feature vector. Implementation is done
using MATLAB. For experimentation we have randomly partitioned the dataset training and
testing data with the proportion of 70% and 30% respectively. We have used receiver operating
characteristic curve (ROC) to evaluate the performance. FROC graphically represents the true
positive rate as a function of false positives rate.
In this study information from multiple modalities such as mammogram and ultrasound was used
to classify the breast mass as benign or malignant. The features retrieved from mammogram are
spiculation feature and denseness texture feature and that from ultrasound are spiculation feature,
shape feature and shadowing feature. From both modalities we have retrieved some additional
features like: standard deviation, entropy and homogeneity. Both modalities supply
complementary information which is helpful in discriminating benign from malignant mass.
Results show that the multimodal fusion improves the performance to classify breast mass more
accurately. Accuracy can still be improved if standard dataset is made available for fusion.
Comparative study in ultrasound methods can be made more accurate if standard dataset is
available. Research towards multimodality in breast cancer analysis is very less. We can work in
different directions of multimodality to improve the sensitivity rate in detecting breast cancer as
early as possible.
Page 18
Feature Level Fusion for Characterization of Breast Mass using Mammogram and
Ultrasound Imaging
Page 19
Feature Level Fusion for Characterization of Breast Mass using Mammogram and
Ultrasound Imaging
Page 20
Feature Level Fusion for Characterization of Breast Mass using Mammogram and
Ultrasound Imaging
CHAPTER IV
RESULT ANALYSIS
4.1 Histogram Equalization
The idea behind Histogram Equalization is that we try to evenly distribute the occurrence of
pixel intensities so that the entire range of intensities is used more fully. We are trying to give
each pixel intensity equal opportunity; thus, equalization. Especially for images with a wide
range of values with detail clustered around a few intensities, histograms will improve the
contrast in the image.
In MATLAB, the function to perform Histogram Equalization is histeq(I).
An image lacks contrast when there are no sharp differences between black and white.
Brightness refers to the overall lightness or darkness of an image.
To change the contrast or brightness of an image, the Adjust Contrast tool performs contrast
stretching. In this process, pixel values below a specified value are displayed as black, pixel
values above a specified value are displayed as white, and pixel values in between these two
values are displayed as shades of gray. The result is a linear mapping of a subset of pixel values
to the entire range of grays, from black to white, producing an image of higher contrast.
Page 21
Feature Level Fusion for Characterization of Breast Mass using Mammogram and
Ultrasound Imaging
Page 22
Feature Level Fusion for Characterization of Breast Mass using Mammogram and
Ultrasound Imaging
2. If a window size is not specified chose the grid size as the default window size.
3. Identify grid points on the image, starting from top-left corner. Each grid point is
separated by grid size pixels.
4. For each grid point calculate the histogram of the region around it, having area equal to
window size and centered at the grid point.
5. If a clipping level is specified clip the histogram computed above to that level and then
use the new histogram to calculate the CDF.
6. After calculating the mappings for each grid point, repeat steps 6 to 8 for each pixel in the
input image.
7. For each pixel find the four closest neighboring grid points that surround that pixel.
8. Using the intensity value of the pixel as an index, find its mapping at the four grid points
based on their cdfs.
9. Interpolate among these values to get the mapping at the current pixel location. Map this
intensity to the range [min:max) and put it in the output image.
Clipping the histogram itself is not quite straight forward because the excess after clipping has to
be redistributed among the other bins, which might increase the level of the clipped histogram.
Hence the clipping should be performed at a level lower than the specified clip level so that after
redistribution the maximum histogram level is equal to the clip level.
The below diagram shows the preprocessing output of the input mammogram image. We observe
that the preprocessed image clearly shows the masses visible which can now be sent for
segmentation.
Page 23
Feature Level Fusion for Characterization of Breast Mass using Mammogram and
Ultrasound Imaging
where m is any real number greater than 1, uij is the degree of membership of xi in the cluster j,
xi is the ith of d-dimensional measured data, cj is the d-dimension center of the cluster, and ||*|| is
any norm expressing the similarity between any measured data and the center.
Fuzzy partitioning is carried out through an iterative optimization of the objective function
shown above, with the update of membership uij and the cluster centers cj by:
Page 24
Feature Level Fusion for Characterization of Breast Mass using Mammogram and
Ultrasound Imaging
3.
4.
If || U(k+1) - U(k)||<
Fuzzy C-means (FCM) algorithm is one of the most popular fuzzy clustering methods widely
used in various tasks of pattern recognition, data mining, image processing, gene expression data
Recognition etc. Modifying and generalizing the FCM algorithm is a prevailing research stream
in fuzzy clustering in recent decades.
Page 25
Feature Level Fusion for Characterization of Breast Mass using Mammogram and
Ultrasound Imaging
K-means clustering
Page 26
Feature Level Fusion for Characterization of Breast Mass using Mammogram and
Ultrasound Imaging
Clustering is the process of partitioning a group of data points into a small number of clusters.
For instance, the items in a supermarket are clustered in categories (butter, cheese and milk are
grouped in dairy products). Of course this is a qualitative kind of partitioning. A quantitative
approach would be to measure certain features of the products, say percentage of milk and
others, and products with high percentage of milk would be grouped together. In general, we
have n data points xi,i=1...n that have to be partitioned in k clusters. The goal is to assign a
cluster to each data point. K-means is a clustering method that aims to find the positions
i,i=1...k of the clusters that minimize the distance from the data points to the cluster. K-means
clustering solves
argminci=1kxcid(x,i)=argminci=1kxcixi22
where ci is the set of points that belong to cluster i. The K-means clustering uses the square of
the Euclidean distance d(x,i)=xi22. This problem is not trivial (in fact it is NP-hard), so the
K-means algorithm only hopes to find the global minimum, possibly getting stuck in a different
solution.
K-means algorithm
The Lloyd's algorithm, mostly known as k-means algorithm, is used to solve the k-means
clustering problem and works as follows. First, decide the number of clusters k. Then:
1. Initialize the center of the clusters
ci={j:d(xj,i)d(xj,l),li,j=1,...,n}
i=1|ci|jcixj,i
The algorithm eventually converges to a point, although it is not necessarily the minimum of the
sum of squares. That is because the problem is non-convex and the algorithm is just a heuristic,
converging to a local minimum. The algorithm stops when the assignments do not change from
one iteration to the next.
Deciding the number of clusters
The number of clusters should match the data. An incorrect choice of the number of clusters will
invalidate the whole process. An empirical way to find the best number of clusters is to try Kmeans clustering with different number of clusters and measure the resulting sum of squares.
Page 27
Feature Level Fusion for Characterization of Breast Mass using Mammogram and
Ultrasound Imaging
Forgy: set the positions of the k clusters to k observations chosen randomly from the
dataset.
Random partition: assign a cluster randomly to each observation and compute means as
in step 3.
Since the algorithm stops in a local minimum, the initial position of the clusters is very
important.
Page 28
Feature Level Fusion for Characterization of Breast Mass using Mammogram and
Ultrasound Imaging
CHAPTER VI
CONCLUSION
Mammography and Ultrasound are the best available inspection facility to detect the
onslaught of breast cancer at the early stage. It can disclose information about abnormality, such
as masses, microcalcifications, bilateral asymmetry, and architectural distortion. For the
hundreds of mammographic images scanned by a radiologist, only a few are cancerous. While
detecting abnormalities, some of them may be missed due to human error, as the detection of
suspicious and abnormal images is a recurrent mission that causes fatigue and eyestrain. Using
CAD to enhance images, segment & extract the suspicious area, more accurate features can be
viewed. Furthermore, they can be classified into appropriate category are the most important
steps that computer aided detection systems can contribute leading to significant reduce in the
false diagnosis of Breast Cancer.
The early detection of Breast Cancer based on image processing techniques is reliable
and can prove to be an important investigative tool in the clinical evaluation of detection of
cancer in early stages
Page 29
Feature Level Fusion for Characterization of Breast Mass using Mammogram and
Ultrasound Imaging
REFERENCES
[1]
www.icmr.nic.in
[2]
http://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/info.cfm?pg=mammo.
[3]
Mammographic Images Enhancement and Denoising for Breast Cancer Detection Using
Dyadic Wavelet Processing, MENCATTINI et al.: MAMMOGRAPHIC IMAGES
ENHANCEMENT AND DENOISING FOR BREAST CANCER DETECTION, 0018-9456,
2008 IEEE.
[4]
Detection of Suspicious Lesions by Adaptive Thresholding Based on Multiresolution
Analysis in Mammograms, Kai Hu, Xieping Gao, and Fei Li: IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON
INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 60, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2011, IEEE.
[5]
HISTOGRAM BASED CONTRAST ENHANCEMENT FOR MAMMOGRAM
IMAGES, M.Sundarami, K.Ramar2, N.Arumugami, G.Prabini, Proceedings of 2011
International Conference on Signal Processing, Communication, Computing and Networking
Technologies (ICSCCN 2011), 2011 IEEE.
[6]
Basic Feature Extractions from Mammograms, Marija Dakovic and Slavoljub Mijovic,
Mediterranean Conference on Embedded Computing MECO - 2012.
[7]
Breast Mass Classification using Statistical and Local Binary Pattern Features, Mohamed
A. Berbar, Yaser. A. Reyad, Mohamed Hussain, 16th International Conference on Information
Visualisation, 2012 IEEE
[8]
Automated Abnormal Mass Detection in the Mammogram Images Using Chebyshev
Moments, Alireza Talebpour, Dooman Arefan and Hamid Mohamadlou, Res. J. Appl. Sci. Eng.
Technol., 5(2): 513-518, 2013.
[9]
Suspicious Lesion Detection in Mammograms using Undecimated Wavelet Transform
and Adaptive Thresholding, Abhijit Nayak, Dipak Kumar Ghosh, Samit Ari, 978-1-4673-28180/13/$31.00 2013 IEEE
[10] A computer-aided diagnosis system for breast cancer detection by using a curvelet
transform, Nebi GEDIK, Ayten ATASOY, Turk J Elec Eng & Comp Sci (2013) 21: 1002 { 1014
TUBITAK
[11] Malignancy Detection in Mammogram using Gray Level Gradient Buffering Method,
Meenalosini S, Kannan E, International Journal of Cancer Research, ISSN:2051-784X, Vol.47,
Issue.1, March 2013.
[12] Particle Swarm Optimization Based Contrast Limited Enhancement for Mammogram
Images, Shelda Mohan and T.R. Mahesh, 978-1-4673-4601-6/13 2013 IEEE
Page 30
Feature Level Fusion for Characterization of Breast Mass using Mammogram and
Ultrasound Imaging
[13] A Computer Aided System for Breast Cancer Detection and Diagnosis, Hamada R. H. AlAbsi, Brahim Belhaouari Samir & Suziah Sulaiman
[14] Mass Detection in Digital Mammograms System Based on PSO Algorithm, Ying-Che
Kuo, Wei-Chen Lin, Shih-Chang Hsu & An-Chun Cheng, 978-1-4799-5277-9/14
[15] Detection of Mammograms Using Honey Bees Mating Optimization Algorithm (MHBMO), R.Durgadevi, B.Hemalatha & K.VishnuKumarKaliappan, 978-1-4799-2876-7/13,
2014.
[16] Isolation of Breast Cancer Accumulation in Mammograms for Improving Radiologists
Analysis, Prapti V. Patil, Rode Yogesh & K. V. Kale, 2014 Engineering and Technology
Publishing , International Journal of Electrical Energy, Vol. 2, No. 2, June 2014
[17] Mammography Feature Analysis and Mass detection in Breast Cancer Images, Bhagwati
Charan Patel & G. R. Sinha, 2014 International Conference on Electronic Systems, Signal
Processing and Computing Technologies
[18] WAVELET TRANSFORMATION-BASED DETECTION OF MASSES IN DIGITAL
MAMMOGRAMS, P.Shanmugavadivu1, V.Sivakumar2, J.Suhanya, IJRET: International Journal
of Research in Engineering and Technology eISSN: 2319-1163 | pISSN: 2321-7308, Volume: 03
Issue: 02 | Feb-2014
[19] Remote Computer-Aided Breast Cancer Detection and Diagnosis System Based on
Cytological Images, Yasmeen Mourice George, Hala Helmy Zayed, Mohamed Ismail Roushdy,
and Bassant Mohamed Elbagoury, 10.1109/JSYST.2013.2279415, IEEE SYSTEMS JOURNAL
1932-8184 2013 IEEE
[20] Dual Modality: Mammogram and Ultrasound Feature Level Fusion for Characterization
of Breast Mass, Minavathi, Murali .S, Dinesh M. S., International Journal of Innovative
Technology and Exploring Engineering (IJITEE) ISSN: 2278-3075, Volume-2 Issue-6, May
2013.
Page 31