title: Quantification of elastic heterogeneity using contourlet-based texture analysis in shear-wave elastography for breast tumor classification.
abstract: Ultrasound shear-wave elastography (SWE) has become a valuable tool for diagnosis of breast tumors. The purpose of this study was to quantify the elastic heterogeneity of breast tumors in SWE by using contourlet-based texture features and evaluating their diagnostic performance for classification of benign and malignant breast tumors, with pathologic results as the gold standard. A total of 161 breast tumors in 125 women who underwent B-mode and SWE ultrasonography before biopsy were included. Five quantitative texture features in SWE images were extracted from the directional subbands after the contourlet transform, including the mean (Tmean), maximum (Tmax), median (Tmed), third quartile (Tqt), and standard deviation (Tsd) of the subbands. Diagnostic performance of the texture features and the classic features was compared using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) and the leave-one-out cross validation with Fisher classifier. The feature Tmean achieved the highest AUC (0.968) among all features and it yielded a sensitivity of 89.1%, a specificity of 94.3% and an accuracy of 92.5% for differentiation between benign and malignant tumors via the leave-one-out cross validation. Compared with the best classic feature, i.e., the maximum elasticity, Tmean improved the AUC, sensitivity, specificity and accuracy by 3.5%, 12.7%, 2.8% and 6.2%, respectively. The Tmed, Tqt and Tsd were also superior to the classic features in terms of the AUC and accuracy. The results demonstrated that the contourlet-based texture features captured the tumor's elastic heterogeneity and improved diagnostic performance contrasted with the classic features.
authors.affiliation: School of Communication and Information Engineering, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China. Electronic address: Zhangq@shu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Qi
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Paul C. Lauterbur Research Center for Biomedical Imaging, Institute of Biomedical and Health Engineering, Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China.
authors.forename: Yang
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Xiao
authors.affiliation: School of Communication and Information Engineering, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China.
authors.forename: Shuai
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: Paul C. Lauterbur Research Center for Biomedical Imaging, Institute of Biomedical and Health Engineering, Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China.
authors.forename: Congzhi
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: Paul C. Lauterbur Research Center for Biomedical Imaging, Institute of Biomedical and Health Engineering, Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China. Electronic address: hr.zheng@siat.ac.cn.
authors.forename: Hairong
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Zheng
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D001943:Breast Neoplasms / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D003937:Diagnosis, Differential; D054459:Elasticity Imaging Techniques / Q000379:methods*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D008875:Middle Aged; D012372:ROC Curve; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D016217:Ultrasonography, Mammary / Q000379:methods*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Breast tumor; Contourlet-based texture analysis; Elastic heterogeneity; Shear-wave elastography (SWE); Ultrasound