Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), an aggressive subtype, is frequently misclassified as fibroadenoma due to benign morphologic features on breast ultrasound (US). This study aims to develop a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system based on texture features for distinguishing between TNBC and benign fibroadenomas in US images.
US images of 169 pathology-proven tumors (mean size, 1.65 cm; range, 0.7–3.0 cm) composed of 84 benign fibroadenomas and 85 TNBC tumors are used in this study. After a tumor is segmented out using the level-set method, morphological, conventional texture, and multiresolution gray-scale invariant texture feature sets are computed using a best-fitting ellipse, gray-level co-occurrence matrices, and the ranklet transform, respectively. The linear support vector machine with leave-one-out cross-validation schema is used as a classifier, and the diagnostic performance is assessed with receiver operating characteristic curve analysis.
The Az values of the morphology, conventional texture, and multiresolution gray-scale invariant texture feature sets are 0.8470 [95% confidence intervals (CIs), 0.7826–0.8973], 0.8542 (95% CI, 0.7911–0.9030), and 0.9695 (95% CI, 0.9376–0.9865), respectively. The Az of the CAD system based on the combined feature sets is 0.9702 (95% CI, 0.9334–0.9882).
The CAD system based on texture features extracted via the ranklet transform may be useful for improving the ability to discriminate between TNBC and benign fibroadenomas.
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This article by Woo Kyung Moon, Yao-Sian Huang, Chung-Ming Lo, Chiun-Sheng Huang, Min Sun Bae, Won Hwa Kim, Jeon-Hor Chen and Ruey-Feng Chang originally appeared on scitation.aip.org on May 26, 2015 at 07:32PM
