Discrimination of liver diseases from CT images based on Gabor filters

In this paper, a liver disease diagnosis based on Gabor filters is proposed. Three kinds of liver diseases are identified: cyst, hepatoma and cavernous hemangioma. The diagnosis scheme includes two steps: features extraction and classification. The features derived from Gabor filters are obtained from the ROIs among the normal and abnormal CT images. In the classification step the SVM classifier is used to discriminate the different liver disease types. Finally the receiver operating characteristic curve is employed to evaluate the performance of the diagnosis system. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through experimental results on CT images including 76 liver cysts, 30 hepatomas, and 40 cavernous hemangiomas. From the results, we can observe that the discrimination rate of cyst is higher than the other diseases, and the classification accuracy decreases slightly between cavernous hemangiomas and hepatomas. However, a normal region can be discriminated from all of these diseases entirely.