A New Approach to Ultrasonic Liver Image Classification

In this paper, we have proposed a new method for diffuse liver disease classification with sonogram, including the normal liver, hepatitis and cirrhosis, from a new point of view “scale.” The new system utilizes a multiscale analysis tool, called wavelet transforms, to analyze the ultrasonic liver images. A new set of features consisting of second order statistics derived from the wavelet transformed images is employed. From these features, we have found that the third scale is the representative scale for the classification of the considered liver diseases, and the horizontal wavelet transform can improve the representation of the corresponding features. Experimental results show that our method can achieve about 88% correct classification rate which is superior to other measures such as the co-occurrence matrices [1], the Fourier power spectrum [2], and the texture spectrum [3]–[5]. This implies that our feature set can access the granularity from sonogram more effectively. It should be pointed out that our features are powerful for discriminating the normal livers from the cirrhosis because there is no misclassification samples between the normal liver and the cirrhosis sets. In addition, the experimental results also verify the usefulness of “scale” because our multiscale feature set can gain eighteen percent advantage over the direct use of the statistical features. This means that the wavelet transform at proper scales can effectively increase the distances among the statistical feature clusters of different liver diseases. key words: diffuse liver disease, image classification, sonogram, wavelet transforms, multiscale