Automatic Nonlinear Filtering and Segmentation for Breast Ultrasound Images

Citation

Elawady M, Sadek I, Shabayek AER, Pons G & Ganau S (2016) Automatic Nonlinear Filtering and Segmentation for Breast Ultrasound Images. In: Campilho A & Karray F (eds.) Image Analysis and Recognition. ICIAR 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 9730. ICIAR 2016: International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition, Póvoa de Varzim, Portugal, 13.07.2016-15.07.2016. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, pp. 206-213. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41501-7_24

Abstract
Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer death among women worldwide. The proposed approach comprises three steps as follows. Firstly, the image is preprocessed to remove speckle noise while preserving important features of the image. Three methods are investigated, i.e., Frost Filter, Detail Preserving Anisotropic Diffusion, and Probabilistic Patch-Based Filter. Secondly, Normalized Cut or Quick Shift is used to provide an initial segmentation map for breast lesions. Thirdly, a postprocessing step is proposed to select the correct region from a set of candidate regions. This approach is implemented on a dataset containing 20 B-mode ultrasound images, acquired from UDIAT Diagnostic Center of Sabadell, Spain. The overall system performance is determined against the ground truth images. The best system performance is achieved through the following combinations: Frost Filter with Quick Shift, Detail Preserving Anisotropic Diffusion with Normalized Cut and Probabilistic Patch-Based with Normalized Cut.

Keywords
Breast cancer; Lesion segmentation; Ultrasound imaging; Speckle noise removal; Nonlinear filtering