Ensembled liver cancer detection and classification using CT images

Abstract

Computed tomography (CT) images are commonly used to diagnose liver disease. It is sometimes very difficult to comment on the type, category and level of the tumor, even for experienced radiologists, directly from the CT image, due to the varying intensities. In recent years, it has been important to design and develop computer-assisted imaging techniques to help doctors/physicians improve their diagnosis. The proposed work is to detect the presence of a tumor region in the liver and classify the different stages of the tumor from CT images. CT images of the liver have been classified between normal and tumor classes. In addition, CT images of the tumor have been classified between Hepato Cellular Carcinoma (HCC) and Metastases (MET). The performance of six different classifiers was evaluated on different parameters. The accuracy achieved for different classifiers varies between 98.39% and 100% for tumor identification and between 76.38% and 87.01% for tumor classification. To further, improve performance, a multi-level ensemble model is developed to detect a tumor (liver cancer) and to classify between HCC and MET using features extracted from CT images. The k-fold cross-validation (CV) is also used to justify the robustness of the classifiers. Compared to the individual classifier, the multi-level ensemble model achieved high accuracy in both the detection and classification of different tumors. This study demonstrates automated tumor characterization based on liver CT images and will assist the radiologist in detecting and classifying different types of tumors at a very early stage.