title: The usefulness of ultrasound in the classification of chronic liver disease.
abstract: Chronic Liver Disease is a progressive, most of the time asymptomatic, and potentially fatal disease. In this paper, a semi-automatic procedure to stage this disease is proposed based on ultrasound liver images, clinical and laboratorial data. In the core of the algorithm two classifiers are used: a k nearest neighbor and a Support Vector Machine, with different kernels. The classifiers were trained with the proposed multi-modal feature set and the results obtained were compared with the laboratorial and clinical feature set. The results showed that using ultrasound based features, in association with laboratorial and clinical features, improve the classification accuracy. The support vector machine, polynomial kernel, outperformed the others classifiers in every class studied. For the Normal class we achieved 100% accuracy, for the chronic hepatitis with cirrhosis 73.08%, for compensated cirrhosis 59.26% and for decompensated cirrhosis 91.67%.
authors.affiliation: Escola Superior de Tecnologia da Saúde de Lisboa and Institute for Systems and Robotics / Instituto Superior Tecnico. ricardo.ribeiro@estesl.ipl.pt
authors.forename: Ricardo
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Ribeiro
authors.forename: Rui Tato
authors.initials: RT
authors.lastname: Marinho
authors.forename: José
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Velosa
authors.forename: Fernando
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Ramalho
authors.forename: J Miguel
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Sanches
authors.forename: Jasjit S
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Suri
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D058625:End Stage Liver Disease / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D006801:Humans; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated / Q000379:methods*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D014463:Ultrasonography / Q000379:methods*