Survey of Denoising, Segmentation and Classification of Pancreatic Cancer Imaging

Abstract

Pancreatic cancer is one of the most serious problems that has taken many lives worldwide. The diagnostic procedure using the traditional approaches was manual by visually analyzing the large volumes of the dataset, making it time-consuming and prone to subjective errors. Hence the need for the computer-aided diagnosis system (CADs) emerged that comprises the machine and deep learning approaches for denoising, segmentation and classification of pancreatic cancer. There are different modalities used for the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, such as Positron Emission Tomography/Computed Tomography (PET/CT), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Multiparametric-MRI (Mp-MRI), Radiomics and Radio-genomics. Although these modalities gave remarkable results in diagnosis on the basis of different criteria. CT is the most commonly used modality that produces detailed and fine contrast images of internal organs of the body. However, it may also contain a certain amount of gaussian and rician noise that is necessary to be preprocessed before segmentation of the required region of interest (ROI) from the images and classification of cancer. This paper analyzes different methodologies used for the complete diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, including the denoising, segmentation and classification, along with the challenges and future scope for the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. Various filters are used for denoising and image smoothening and filters as gaussian scale mixture process, non-local means, median filter, adaptive filter and average filter have been used more for better results. In terms of segmentation, atlas based region-growing method proved to give better results as compared to the state of the art whereas, for the classification, deep learning approaches outperformed other methodologies to classify the images as cancerous and non- cancerous. These methodologies have proved that CAD systems have become a better solution to the ongoing research proposals for the detection of pancreatic cancer worldwide.