Correlations among Acoustic,Texture and Morphological Features for Breast Ultrasound CAD

Abstract

Acoustic, textural and morphological features of the breast in ultrasound imaging were extracted for computer-aided diagnosis. In addition, correlations among different categories of features were analyzed. Clinical data from 14 patients (7 malignant and 7 benign samples) were acquired. A custom-made experimental apparatus was used for simultaneous data acquisition of B-mode ultrasound and limited-angle tomography images. Textural features were extracted from B-mode images, including five parameters derived from the gray-level concurrence matrix and five parameters derived from a nonseparable wavelet transform. Morphological features were also extracted from B-mode images, including the depth-to-width ratio and normalized radial gradient. Acoustic features were estimated using limited-angle tomography, including the sound velocity and attenuation coefficient. Generally, the correlation coefficients for features within the textural feature group were relatively high (0.48–0.79), whereas those between different feature categories were relatively low (0.17–0.40). This suggests that combining different sets of features would improve the computer-aided diagnosis of breast cancer.