Ultrasound liver tumor segmentation using adaptively regularized kernel-based fuzzy C means with enhanced level set algorithm

The purpose of this study is to develop a hybrid algorithm for segmenting tumor from ultrasound images of the liver.

After collecting the ultrasound images, contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization approach (CLAHE) is applied as preprocessing, in order to enhance the visual quality of the images that helps in better segmentation. Then, adaptively regularized kernel-based fuzzy C means (ARKFCM) is used to segment tumor from the enhanced image along with local ternary pattern combined with selective level set approaches.

The proposed segmentation algorithm precisely segments the tumor portions from the enhanced images with lower computation cost. The proposed segmentation algorithm is compared with the existing algorithms and ground truth values in terms of Jaccard coefficient, dice coefficient, precision, Matthews correlation coefficient, f-score and accuracy. The experimental analysis shows that the proposed algorithm achieved 99.18% of accuracy and 92.17% of f-score value, which is better than the existing algorithms.

From the experimental analysis, the proposed ARKFCM with enhanced level set algorithm obtained better performance in ultrasound liver tumor segmentation related to graph-based algorithm. However, the proposed algorithm showed 3.11% improvement in dice coefficient compared to graph-based algorithm.

The image preprocessing is carried out using CLAHE algorithm. The preprocessed image is segmented by employing selective level set model and Local Ternary Pattern in ARKFCM algorithm. In this research, the proposed algorithm has advantages such as independence of clustering parameters, robustness in preserving the image details and optimal in finding the threshold value that effectively reduces the computational cost.