title: Computer-Aided Diagnosis of Focal Liver Lesions Using Contrast-Enhanced Ultrasonography With Perflubutane Microbubbles.
abstract: This paper proposes an automatic classification method based on machine learning in contrast-enhanced ultrasonography (CEUS) of focal liver lesions using the contrast agent Sonazoid. This method yields spatial and temporal features in the arterial phase, portal phase, and post-vascular phase, as well as max-hold images. The lesions are classified as benign or malignant and again as benign, hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), or metastatic liver tumor using support vector machines (SVM) with a combination of selected optimal features. Experimental results using 98 subjects indicated that the benign and malignant classification has 94.0% sensitivity, 87.1% specificity, and 91.8% accuracy, and the accuracy of the benign, HCC, and metastatic liver tumor classifications are 84.4%, 87.7%, and 85.7%, respectively. The selected features in the SVM indicate that combining features from the three phases are important for classifying FLLs, especially, for the benign and malignant classifications. The experimental results are consistent with CEUS guidelines for diagnosing FLLs. This research can be considered to be a validation study, that confirms the importance of using features from these phases of the examination in a quantitative manner. In addition, the experimental results indicate that for the benign and malignant classifications, the specificity without the post-vascular phase features is significantly lower than the specificity with the post-vascular phase features. We also conducted an experiment on the operator dependency of setting regions of interest and observed that the intra-operator and inter-operator kappa coefficients were 0.45 and 0.77, respectively.
authors.forename: Satoshi
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kondo
authors.forename: Kazuya
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Takagi
authors.forename: Mutsumi
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Nishida
authors.forename: Takahito
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Iwai
authors.forename: Yusuke
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Kudo
authors.forename: Kouji
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Ogawa
authors.forename: Toshiya
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Kamiyama
authors.forename: Hitoshi
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Shibuya
authors.forename: Kaoru
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Kahata
authors.forename: Chikara
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Shimizu
mesh_terms: D003287:Contrast Media; D005466:Fluorocarbons; D006801:Humans; D008113:Liver Neoplasms; D045423:Microbubbles; D014463:Ultrasonography
chemical_list: D003287:Contrast Media; D005466:Fluorocarbons; C108042:perfluorobutane