MULTI-FEATURE-BASED SEGMENTATION OF SONOELASTOGRAPHIC BREAST IMAGES

Abstract

Breast cancer is the leading cause of death in women. Early detection and early treatment can significantly reduce the breast cancer mortality. Texture features are widely used in classification problems, i.e., mainly for diagnostic purposes where the region of interest is delineated manually. It has not yet been considered for sonoelastographic segmentation. This paper proposes a method of segmenting the sonoelastographic breast images with optimum number of features from 32 features extracted from three different extraction methods: Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM), Local Binary Pattern (LBP), and Edge-Based Features. The image undergoes preprocessing by Sticks filter that improves the contrast and enhances the edges and emphasizes the tumor boundary. The features are extracted and then ranked according to the Sequential Forward Floating Selection (SFFS). The optimum number of ranked features is used for segmentation using k-means clustering. The segmented images are subjected to morphological processing that marks the tumor boundary. The overall accuracy is studied to investigate the effect of automated segmentation where the subset of first 10 ranked features provides an accuracy of 79%. The combined metric of overlap, over- and under-segmentation is 90%. The proposed work can also be considered for diagnostic purposes, along with the sonographic breast images.