Effect of complex wavelet transform filter on thyroid tumor classification in three-dimensional ultrasound

Abstract

Ultrasonography has great potential in differentiating malignant thyroid nodules from the benign ones. However, visual interpretation is limited by interobserver variability, and further, the speckle distribution poses a challenge during the classification process. This article thus presents an automated system for tumor classification in three-dimensional contrast-enhanced ultrasonography data sets. The system first processes the contrast-enhanced ultrasonography images using complex wavelet transform-based filter to mitigate the effect of speckle noise. The higher order spectra features are then extracted and used as input for training and testing a fuzzy classifier. In the off-line training system, higher order spectra features are extracted from a set of images known as the training images. These higher order spectra features along with the clinically assigned ground truth are used to train the classifier and obtain an estimate of the classifier or training parameters. The ground truth tells the class label of the image (i.e. whether the image belongs to a benign or malignant nodule). During the online testing phase, the estimated classifier parameters are applied on the higher order spectra features that are extracted from the testing images to predict their class labels. The predicted class labels are compared with their corresponding original ground truth to evaluate the performance of the classifier. Without utilizing the complex wavelet transform filter, the fuzzy classifier demonstrated an accuracy of 91.6%, while utilizing the complex wavelet transform filter, the accuracy significantly boosted to 99.1%.