Improvement in breast tumor discrimination by support vector machines and speckle-emphasis texture analysis

Ultrasound Med Biol. 2003 May;29(5):679-86. doi: 10.1016/s0301-5629(02)00788-3.

Abstract

Recent statistics show that breast cancer is a major cause of death among women in developed countries. Hence, finding an accurate and effective diagnostic method is very important. In this paper, we propose a high precision computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system for sonography. We utilize a support vector machine (SVM) to classify breast tumors according to their texture information surrounding speckle pixels. We test our system with 250 pathologically-proven breast tumors including 140 benign and 110 malignant ones. Also we compare the diagnostic performances of three texture features, i.e., speckle-emphasis texture feature, nonspeckle-emphasis texture feature and conventional all pixels texture feature, applied to breast sonography using SVM. In our experiment, the accuracy of SVM with speckle information for classifying malignancies is 93.2% (233/250), the sensitivity is 95.45% (105/110), the specificity is 91.43% (128/140), the positive predictive value is 89.74% (105/117) and the negative predictive value is 96.24% (128/133). Based on the experimental results, speckle phenomenon is a useful tool to be used in computer-aided diagnosis; its performance is better than those of the other two features. Speckle phenomenon, which is considered as noise in sonography, can intrude into judgments of a physician using naked eyes but it is another story for application in a computer-aided diagnosis algorithm.

Publication types

  • Evaluation Study
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Breast Neoplasms / diagnostic imaging*
  • Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Diagnosis, Differential
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods
  • Pattern Recognition, Automated
  • Predictive Value of Tests
  • ROC Curve
  • Sensitivity and Specificity
  • Ultrasonography, Mammary / methods*