Hepatocellular Carcinoma Automatic Diagnosis within CEUS and B-Mode Ultrasound Images Using Advanced Machine Learning Methods

Hepatocellular Carcinoma (HCC) is the most common malignant liver tumor, being present in 70% of liver cancer cases. It usually evolves on the top of the cirrhotic parenchyma. The most reliable method for HCC diagnosis is the needle biopsy, which is an invasive, dangerous method. In our research, specific techniques for non-invasive, computerized HCC diagnosis are developed, by exploiting the information from ultrasound images. In this work, the possibility of performing the automatic diagnosis of HCC within B-mode ultrasound and Contrast-Enhanced Ultrasound (CEUS) images, using advanced machine learning methods based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), was assessed. The recognition performance was evaluated separately on B-mode ultrasound images and on CEUS images, respectively, as well as on combined B-mode ultrasound and CEUS images. For this purpose, we considered the possibility of combining the input images directly, performing feature level fusion, then providing the resulted data at the entrances of representative CNN classifiers. In addition, several multimodal combined classifiers were experimented, resulted by the fusion, at classifier, respectively, at the decision levels of two different branches based on the same CNN architecture, as well as on different CNN architectures. Various combination methods, and also the dimensionality reduction method of Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA), were involved in this process. These results were compared with those obtained on the same dataset, when employing advanced texture analysis techniques in conjunction with conventional classification methods and also with equivalent state-of-the-art approaches. An accuracy above 97% was achieved when our new methodology was applied.