Application of Fractal and Wavelets in Microcalcification Detection

Breast cancer has been recognized as one or the most frequent, malignant tumors in women, clustered microcalcifications in mammogram images has been widely recognized as an early sign of breast cancer. This work is devote to review the application of Fractal and Wavelets in microcalcifications detection

Texture analysis of aggressive and nonaggressive lung tumor CE CT images

This paper presents the potential for fractal analysis of time sequence contrast-enhanced (CE) computed tomography (CT) images to differentiate between aggressive and nonaggressive malignant lung tumors (i.e., high and low metabolic tumors). The aim is to enhance CT tumor staging prediction accuracy through identifying malignant aggressiveness of lung tumors. As branching of blood vessels can be considered a fractal process, the research examines vascularized tumor regions that exhibit strong fractal characteristics. The analysis is performed after injecting 15 patients with a contrast agent and transforming at least 11 time sequence CE CT images from each patient to the fractal dimension and determining corresponding lacunarity. The fractal texture features were averaged over the tumor region and quantitative classification showed up to 83.3% accuracy in distinction between advanced (aggressive) and early-stage (nonaggressive) malignant tumors. Also, it showed strong correlation with corresponding lung tumor stage and standardized tumor uptake value of fluoro deoxyglucose as determined by positron emission tomography. These results indicate that fractal analysis of time sequence CE CT images of malignant lung tumors could provide additional information about likely tumor aggression that could potentially impact on clinical management decisions in choosing the appropriate treatment procedure

Computer-aided Diagnosis in Breast Ultrasound

Cancer remains a leading cause of death in Taiwan, and the prevalence of breast cancer has increased in recent years. The early detection and diagnosis of breast cancer is the key to ensuring prompt treatment and a reduced death rate. Mammography and ultrasound (US) are the main imaging techniques used in the detection of breast cancer. The heterogeneity of breast cancers leads to an overlap in benign and malignant ultrasonography images, and US examinations are also operator dependent. Recently, computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) has become a major research topic in medical imaging and diagnosis. Technical advances such as tissue harmonic imaging, compound imaging, split screen imaging and extended field-of-view imaging, Doppler US, the use of intravenous contrast agents, elastography, and CAD systems have expanded the clinical application of breast US. Breast US CAD can be an efficient computerized model to provide a second opinion and avoid interobserver variation. Various breast US CAD systems have been developed using techniques which combine image texture extraction and a decision-making algorithm. However, the textural analysis is system dependent and can only be performed well using one specific US system. Recently, several researchers have demonstrated the use of such CAD systems with various US machines mainly for preprocessing techniques designed to homogenize textural features between systems. Morphology-based CAD systems used for the diagnosis of solid breast tumors have the advantage of being nearly independent of either the settings of US systems or different US machines. Future research on CAD systems should include pathologically specific tissue-related and hormonerelated conjecture, which could be applied to picture archiving and communication systems or teleradiology

Quantification of tumour heterogenity in MRI

Cancer is the leading cause of death that touches us all, either directly or indirectly. It is estimated that the number of newly diagnosed cases in the Netherlands will increase to 123,000 by the year 2020. General Dutch statistics are similar to those in the UK, i.e. over the last ten years, the age-standardised incidence rate1 has stabilised at around 355 females and 415 males per 100,000. Figure 1 shows the cancer incidence per gender. In the UK, the rise in lifetime risk of cancer is more than one in three and depends on many factors, including age, lifestyle and genetic makeup

A comparative study in ultrasound breast imaging classification

American College of Radiology introduces a standard in classification, the breast imaging reporting and data system (BIRADS), standardize the reporting of ultrasound findings, clarify its interpretation, and facilitate communication between clinicians. The effective use of new technologies to support healthcare initiatives is important and current research is moving towards implementing computer tools in the diagnostics process. Initially a detailed study was carried out to evaluate the performance of two commonly used appearance based classification algorithms, based on the use of Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and two dimensional linear discriminant analysis (2D-LDA). The study showed that these two appearance based classification approaches are not capable of handling the classification of ultrasound breast image lesions. Therefore further investigations in the use of a popular feature based classifier – Support Vector Machine (SVM) was conducted. A pre-processing step before feature based classification is feature extraction, which involve shape, texture and edge descriptors for the Region of Interest (ROI). The input dataset to SVM classification is from a fully automated ROI detection. We achieve the success rate of 0.550 in PCA, 0.500 in LDA, and 0.931 in SVM. The best combination of features in SVM classification is to combine the shape, texture and edge descriptors, with sensitivity 0.840 and specificity 0.968. This paper briefly reviews the background to the project and then details the ongoing research. In conclusion, we discuss the contributions, limitations, and future plans of our work

Enhanced algorithms for lesion detection and recognition in ultrasound breast images

Mammography is the gold standard for breast cancer detection. However, it has very high false positive rates and is based on ionizing radiation. This has led to interest in using multi-modal approaches. One modality is diagnostic ultrasound, which is based on non-ionizing radiation and picks up many of the cancers that are generally missed by mammography. However, the presence of speckle noise in ultrasound images has a negative effect on image interpretation. Noise reduction, inconsistencies in capture and segmentation of lesions still remain challenging open research problems in ultrasound images. The target of the proposed research is to enhance the state-of-art computer vision algorithms used in ultrasound imaging and to investigate the role of computer processed images in human diagnostic performance. [Continues.