An image processing decisional system for the Achilles tendon using ultrasound images

The Achilles Tendon (AT) is described as the largest and strongest tendon in the human body. As for any other organs in the human body, the AT is associated with some medical problems that include Achilles rupture and Achilles tendonitis. AT rupture affects about 1 in 5,000 people worldwide. Additionally, AT is seen in about 10 percent of the patients involved in sports activities. Today, ultrasound imaging plays a crucial role in medical imaging technologies. It is portable, non-invasive, free of radiation risks, relatively inexpensive and capable of taking real-time images. There is a lack of research that looks into the early detection and diagnosis of AT abnormalities from ultrasound images. This motivated the researcher to build a complete system which enables one to crop, denoise, enhance, extract the important features and classify AT ultrasound images. The proposed application focuses on developing an automated system platform. Generally, systems for analysing ultrasound images involve four stages, pre-processing, segmentation, feature extraction and classification. To produce the best results for classifying the AT, SRAD, CLAHE, GLCM, GLRLM, KPCA algorithms have been used. This was followed by the use of different standard and ensemble classifiers trained and tested using the dataset samples and reduced features to categorize the AT images into normal or abnormal. Various classifiers have been adopted in this research to improve the classification accuracy. To build an image decisional system, a 57 AT ultrasound images has been collected. These images were used in three different approaches where the Region of Interest (ROI) position and size are located differently. To avoid the imbalanced misleading metrics, different evaluation metrics have been adapted to compare different classifiers and evaluate the whole classification accuracy. The classification outcomes are evaluated using different metrics in order to estimate the decisional system performance. A high accuracy of 83% was achieved during the classification process. Most of the ensemble classifies worked better than the standard classifiers in all the three ROI approaches. The research aim was achieved and accomplished by building an image processing decisional system for the AT ultrasound images. This system can distinguish between normal and abnormal AT ultrasound images. In this decisional system, AT images were improved and enhanced to achieve a high accuracy of classification without any user intervention