Robust segmentation and intelligent decision system for cerebrovascular disease.

Abstract

Segmentation and classification of low-quality and noisy ultrasound images is challenging task. In this paper, a new approach is proposed for robust segmentation and classification of carotid artery ultrasound images and consequently, detecting cerebrovascular disease. The proposed technique consists of two phases, in first phase; it refines the class labels selected by user using expectation maximization algorithm. Genetic algorithm is then employed to select discriminative features based on moments of gray-level histogram. The selected features and refined targets are fed as input to neuro-fuzzy classifier for performing segmentation. Finally, intima-media thickness values are measured from segmented images to segregate the normal and abnormal subjects. In second phase, an intelligent decision-making system based on support vector machine is developed to utilize the intima-media thickness values for detecting cerebrovascular disease. The proposed robust segmentation and classification technique for ultrasound images (RSC-US) has been tested on a dataset of 300 real carotid artery ultrasound images and yields accuracy, F-measure, and MCC scores of 98.84, 0.988, 0.9767%, respectively, using jackknife test. The segmentation and classification performance of the proposed (RSC-US) has been also tested at several noise levels and may be used as secondary observation.