Three-Dimensional Local Energy-Based Shape Histogram (3D-LESH): A Novel Feature Extraction Technique

In this paper, we present a novel feature extraction technique, termed Three-Dimensional Local Energy-Based Shape Histogram (3D-LESH), and exploit it to detect breast cancer in volumetric medical images. The technique is incorporated as part of an intelligent expert system that can aid medical practitioners making diagnostic decisions. Analysis of volumetric images, slice by slice, is cumbersome and inefficient. Hence, 3D-LESH is designed to compute a histogram-based feature set from a local energy map, calculated using a phase congruency (PC) measure of volumetric Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans in 3D space. 3D-LESH features are invariant to contrast intensity variations within different slices of the MRI scan and are thus suitable for medical image analysis.The contribution of this article is manifold. First, we formulate a novel 3D-LESH feature extraction technique for 3D medical images to analyse volumetric images. Further, the proposed 3D-LESH algorithmis, for the first time, applied to medical MRI images. The final contribution is the design of an intelligent clinical decision support system (CDSS) as a multi-stage approach, combining novel 3D-LESH feature extraction with machine learning classifiers, to detect cancer from breast MRI scans. The proposed system applies contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalisation (CLAHE) to the MRI images before extracting 3D-LESH features. Furthermore, a selected subset of these features is fed into a machine-learning classifier, namely, a support vector machine (SVM), an extreme learning machine (ELM) or an echo state network (ESN) classifier, to detect abnormalities and distinguish between different stages of abnormality. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed technique by its application to benchmark breast cancer MRI images. The results indicate high-performance accuracy of the proposed system (98%±0.0050, with an area under a receiver operating charactertistic curve value of 0.9900 ± 0.0050) with multiple classifiers. When compared with the state-of-the-art wavelet-based feature extraction technique, statistical analysis provides conclusive evidence of the significance of our proposed 3D-LESH algorithm

Speech Enhancement Based on Adaptive Noise Cancellation and Particle Swarm Optimization

Speech enhancement is used in almost all modern communication systems. This is due to the quality of speech being degraded by environmental interference factors, such as: Acoustic additive noise, acoustic reverberation or white Gaussian noise. This paper, explores the potential of different benchmark optimization techniques for enhancing the speech signal. This is accomplished by fine tuning filter coefficients using a diverse set of adaptive filters for noise suppression in speech signals. We consider the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and its variants in conjunction with the Adaptive Noise Cancellation (ANC) approach, for delivering dual speech enhancement. Comparative simulation results demonstrate the potential of an optimized coefficient ANC over a fixed one. Experiments are performed at different signal to noise ratios (SNRs), using two benchmark datasets: the NOIZEUS and Arabic dataset. The performance of the proposed algorithms is evaluated by maximising the perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) and comparing to the audio-only Wiener Filter (AW) and the Adaptive PSO for dual channel (APSOforDual) algorithms

Local energy-based shape histogram feature extraction technique for breast cancer diagnosis

This paper proposes a novel local energy-based shape histogram (LESH) as the feature set for recognition of abnormalities in mammograms. It investigates the implication of this technique on mammogram datasets of the Mammographic Image Analysis Society and INbreast. In the evaluation, regions of interest were extracted from the mammograms, their LESH features were calculated, and they were fed to support vector machine (SVM) classifiers. In addition, the impact of selecting a subset of LESH features on classification performance was also observed and benchmarked against a state-of-the-art wavelet based feature extraction method. The proposed method achieved a higher classification accuracy of range 99.00±0.50 as well as an Az value of 0.9900±0.0050 with multiple SVM kernels where linear kernel performs with 100% accuracy for distinguishing between the abnormalities (masses vs. microcalcifications). Hence, the general capability of the proposed method was established, in which it not only distinguishes between malignant and benign cases for any type of abnormality but also among different types of abnormalities. It is therefore concluded that LESH features are an excellent choice for extracting significant clinical information from mammogram images with significant potential for application to 3-D MRI images