Feature Fusion for Diagnosis of Atypical Hepatocellular Carcinoma in Contrast- Enhanced Ultrasound

IEEE Trans Ultrason Ferroelectr Freq Control. 2022 Jan;69(1):114-123. doi: 10.1109/TUFFC.2021.3110590. Epub 2021 Dec 31.

Abstract

Contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) is generally employed for focal liver lesions (FLLs) diagnosis. Among the FLLs, atypical hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is difficult to distinguish from focal nodular hyperplasia (FNH) in CEUS video. For this reason, we propose and evaluate a feature fusion method to resolve this problem. The proposed algorithm extracts a set of hand-crafted features and the deep features from the CEUS cine clip data. The hand-crafted features include the spatial-temporal feature based on a novel descriptor called Velocity-Similarity and Dissimilarity Matching Local Binary Pattern (V-SDMLBP), and the deep features from a 3-D convolution neural network (3D-CNN). Then the two types of features are fused. Finally, a classifier is employed to diagnose HCC or FNH. Several classifiers have achieved excellent performance, which demonstrates the superiority of the fused features. In addition, compared with general CNNs, the proposed fused features have better interpretability.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Carcinoma, Hepatocellular* / diagnostic imaging
  • Contrast Media
  • Focal Nodular Hyperplasia*
  • Humans
  • Liver Neoplasms* / diagnostic imaging
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging
  • Ultrasonography

Substances

  • Contrast Media