A Benign and Malignant Breast Tumor Classification Method via Efficiently Combining Texture and Morphological Features on Ultrasound Images

Abstract

The classification of benign and malignant based on ultrasound images is of great value because breast cancer is an enormous threat to women’s health worldwide. Although both texture and morphological features are crucial representations of ultrasound breast tumor images, their straightforward combination brings little effect for improving the classification of benign and malignant since high-dimensional texture features are too aggressive so that drown out the effect of low-dimensional morphological features. For that, an efficient texture and morphological feature combing method is proposed to improve the classification of benign and malignant. Firstly, both texture (i.e., local binary patterns (LBP), histogram of oriented gradients (HOG), and gray-level co-occurrence matrixes (GLCM)) and morphological (i.e., shape complexities) features of breast ultrasound images are extracted. Secondly, a support vector machine (SVM) classifier working on texture features is trained, and a naive Bayes (NB) classifier acting on morphological features is designed, in order to exert the discriminative power of texture features and morphological features, respectively. Thirdly, the classification scores of the two classifiers (i.e., SVM and NB) are weighted fused to obtain the final classification result. The low-dimensional nonparameterized NB classifier is effectively control the parameter complexity of the entire classification system combine with the high-dimensional parametric SVM classifier. Consequently, texture and morphological features are efficiently combined. Comprehensive experimental analyses are presented, and the proposed method obtains a 91.11% accuracy, a 94.34% sensitivity, and an 86.49% specificity, which outperforms many related benign and malignant breast tumor classification methods.