Investigating the use of texture features for analysis of breast lesions on contrast-enhanced cone beam CT

Xixi Wang; Mahesh B. Nagarajan; David Conover; Ruola Ning; Avice O'Connell; Axel Wismueller

doi:10.1117/12.2042397

9 April 2014 Investigating the use of texture features for analysis of breast lesions on contrast-enhanced cone beam CT

Xixi Wang, Mahesh B. Nagarajan, David Conover, Ruola Ning, Avice O'Connell, Axel Wismueller

Proceedings Volume 9038, Medical Imaging 2014: Biomedical Applications in Molecular, Structural, and Functional Imaging; 903822 (2014) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2042397
Event: SPIE Medical Imaging, 2014, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

Cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) has found use in mammography for imaging the entire breast with sufficient spatial resolution at a radiation dose within the range of that of conventional mammography. Recently, enhancement of lesion tissue through the use of contrast agents has been proposed for cone beam CT. This study investigates whether the use of such contrast agents improves the ability of texture features to differentiate lesion texture from healthy tissue on CBCT in an automated manner. For this purpose, 9 lesions were annotated by an experienced radiologist on both regular and contrast-enhanced CBCT images using two-dimensional (2D) square ROIs. These lesions were then segmented, and each pixel within the lesion ROI was assigned a label – lesion or non-lesion, based on the segmentation mask. On both sets of CBCT images, four three-dimensional (3D) Minkowski Functionals were used to characterize the local topology at each pixel. The resulting feature vectors were then used in a machine learning task involving support vector regression with a linear kernel (SVRlin) to classify each pixel as belonging to the lesion or non-lesion region of the ROI. Classification performance was assessed using the area under the receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC). Minkowski Functionals derived from contrastenhanced CBCT images were found to exhibit significantly better performance at distinguishing between lesion and non-lesion areas within the ROI when compared to those extracted from CBCT images without contrast enhancement (p < 0.05). Thus, contrast enhancement in CBCT can improve the ability of texture features to distinguish lesions from surrounding healthy tissue.

Citation Download Citation

Xixi Wang, Mahesh B. Nagarajan, David Conover, Ruola Ning, Avice O'Connell, and Axel Wismueller "Investigating the use of texture features for analysis of breast lesions on contrast-enhanced cone beam CT", Proc. SPIE 9038, Medical Imaging 2014: Biomedical Applications in Molecular, Structural, and Functional Imaging, 903822 (9 April 2014); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2042397

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