A Novel Computer-Aided-Diagnosis System for Breast Ultrasound Images Based on BI-RADS Categories

Abstract

The breast ultrasound is not only one of major devices for breast tissue imaging, but also one of important methods in breast tumor screening. It is non-radiative, non-invasive, harmless, simple, and low cost screening. The American College of Radiology (ACR) proposed the Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System (BI-RADS) to evaluate far more breast lesion severities compared to traditional diagnoses according to five-criterion categories of masses composition described as follows: shape, orientation, margin, echo pattern, and posterior features. However, there exist some problems, such as intensity differences and different resolutions in image acquisition among different types of ultrasound imaging modalities so that clinicians cannot always identify accurately the BI-RADS categories or disease severities. To this end, this article adopted three different brands of ultrasound scanners to fetch breast images for our experimental samples. The breast lesion was detected on the original image using preprocessing, image segmentation, etc. The breast tumor’s severity was evaluated on the features of the breast lesion via our proposed classifiers according to the BI-RADS standard rather than traditional assessment on the severity; i.e., merely using benign or malignant. In this work, we mainly focused on the BI-RADS categories 2–5 after the stage of segmentation as a result of the clinical practice. Moreover, several features related to lesion severities based on the selected BI-RADS categories were introduced into three machine learning classifiers, including a Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), and Convolution Neural Network (CNN) combined with feature selection to develop a multi-class assessment of breast tumor severity based on BI-RADS. Experimental results show that the proposed CAD system based on BI-RADS can obtain the identification accuracies with SVM, RF, and CNN reaching 80.00%, 77.78%, and 85.42%, respectively. We also validated the performance and adaptability of the classification using different ultrasound scanners. Results also indicate that the evaluations of F-score based on CNN can obtain measures higher than 75% (i.e., prominent adaptability) when samples were tested on various BI-RADS categories.