A novel approach for breast ultrasound classification using two-dimensional empirical mode decomposition and multiple features

Abstract

Aim: Breast cancer stands as a prominent cause of female mortality on a global scale, underscoring the critical need for precise and efficient diagnostic techniques. This research significantly enriches the body of knowledge pertaining to breast cancer classification, especially when employing breast ultrasound images, by introducing a novel method rooted in the two dimensional empirical mode decomposition (biEMD) method. In this study, an evaluation of the classification performance is proposed based on various texture features of breast ultrasound images and their corresponding biEMD subbands.

Methods: A total of 437 benign and 210 malignant breast ultrasound images were analyzed, preprocessed, and decomposed into three biEMD sub-bands. A variety of features, including the Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM), Local Binary Patterns (LBP), and Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG), were extracted, and a feature selection process was performed using the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator method. The study employed GLCM, LBP and HOG, and machine learning techniques, including artificial neural networks (ANN), k-nearest neighbors (kNN), the ensemble method, and statistical discriminant analysis, to classify benign and malignant cases. The classification performance, measured through Area Under the Curve (AUC), accuracy, and F1 score, was evaluated using a 10-fold cross-validation approach.

Results: The study showed that using the ANN method and hybrid features (GLCM+LBP+HOG) from BUS images' biEMD sub-bands led to excellent performance, with an AUC of 0.9945, an accuracy of 0.9644, and an F1 score of 0.9668. This has revealed the effectiveness of the biEMD method for classifying breast tumor types from ultrasound images.

Conclusion: The obtained results have revealed the effectiveness of the biEMD method for classifying breast tumor types from ultrasound images, demonstrating high-performance classification using the proposed approach.