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Differentiating benign and malignant mass and non-mass lesions in breast DCE-MRI using normalized frequency-based features

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International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Purpose

In this study, we propose a new computer-aided diagnosis (CADx) to distinguish between malign and benign mass and non-mass lesions in breast DCE-MRI. For this purpose, we introduce new frequency textural features.

Methods

In this paper, we propose novel normalized frequency-based features. These are obtained by applying the dual-tree complex wavelet transform to MRI slices containing a lesion for specific decomposition levels. The low-pass and band-pass frequency coefficients of the dual-tree complex wavelet transform represent the general shape and texture features, respectively, of the lesion. The extraction of these features is computationally efficient. We employ a support vector machine to classify the lesions, and investigate modified cost functions and under- and oversampling strategies to handle the class imbalance.

Results

The proposed method has been tested on a dataset of 80 patients containing 103 lesions. An area under the curve of 0.98 for the mass and 0.94 for the non-mass lesions is obtained. Similarly, accuracies of 96.9% and 89.8%, sensitivities of 93.8% and 84.6% and specificities of 98% and 92.3% are obtained for the mass and non-mass lesions, respectively.

Conclusion

Normalized frequency-based features can characterize benign and malignant lesions efficiently in both mass- and non-mass-like lesions. Additionally, the combination of normalized frequency-based features and three-dimensional shape descriptors improves the CADx performance.

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Notes

  1. http://een.iust.ac.ir/profs/Shokouhi/IUST-BREASTMRI-DATABASE/.

  2. Different parameters are due to different protocols.

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Acknowledgements

This research is partially supported by the Iran National Science Foundation (INSF). The authors would like to thank the Noor Medical Imaging Center and the Valiasr MRI Center in Tehran, Iran, for their help and cooperation in providing the datasets used in this study.

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Correspondence to Fazael Ayatollahi.

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Ayatollahi, F., Shokouhi, S.B. & Teuwen, J. Differentiating benign and malignant mass and non-mass lesions in breast DCE-MRI using normalized frequency-based features. Int J CARS 15, 297–307 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-019-02103-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-019-02103-z

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