Automatic Recognition of the Hepatocellular Carcinoma from Ultrasound Images using Complex Textural Microstructure Co-Occurrence Matrices (CTMCM)

The hepatocellular carcinoma is one of the most frequent malignant liver tumours. The golden standard for HCC detection is the needle biopsy, but this is a dangerous technique. We aim to perform the non-invasive recognition of this tumour, using computerized methods within ultrasound images. For this purpose, we defined the textural model of HCC, consisting of the relevant textural features that separate this tumour from other visually similar tissues and of the specific values that correspond to these relevant features: arithmetic mean, standard deviation, probability distribution. In this paper, we demonstrate the role that the Complex Textural Microstructure Co-occurrence Matrices have in the improvement of the textural model of HCC and in the increase of the recognition performance. During the experiments, we considered the following classes: cirrhosis, HCC, cirrhotic parenchyma on which HCC evolved and hemangioma, a frequent benign liver tumour. The resulted recognition accuracy for HCC was towards 90%.