Diagnostic analysis of liver B ultrasonic

texture features based on LM neural network

Cite as: AIP Conference Proceedings 1820, 060011 (2017); https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4977326
Published Online: 13 March 2017

Qingyun Chi, Hu Hua, Menglin Liu, and Xiuying Jiang

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AIP Conference Proceedings 1820, 060011 (2017); https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4977326 1820, 060011

© 2017 Author(s).
 Diagnostic Analysis of liver B Ultrasonic Texture Features
Based on LM Neural Network
Qingyun Chi1, a), Hu Hua1, b), Menglin Liu1, c) and Xiuying Jiang2, d)
1
School of Information Science and Engineering, Zaozhuang University, Zaozhuang 277160, China.
2
Network Centre, Zaozhuang University, Zaozhuang 277160, China.
a)
Corresponding author: cqysd@163.com
b)
hhsx@163.com
c)
906270826@QQ.com
d)
jiangxiuyingxyz@163.com

Abstract. In this study, B ultrasound images of 124 benign and malignant patients were randomly selected as the study
objects. The B ultrasound images of the liver were treated by enhanced de-noising. By constructing the gray level co-
occurrence matrix which reflects the information of each angle, Principal Component Analysis of 22 texture features
were extracted and combined with LM neural network for diagnosis and classification. Experimental results show that
this method is a rapid and effective diagnostic method for liver imaging, which provides a quantitative basis for clinical
diagnosis of liver diseases.

Key words: Liver; Gray Symbiotic Matrix; Texture Feature; PCA; Neural Network.

INTRODUCTION
China is a high-prevalence area of hepatitis virus infection and there are lots of people with liver disease. The
primary liver cancer is one of the common malignant tumors and the death rate is in the third place in malignant
tumors of digestive system [1]. Early detection of benign and malignant lesions is of positive significance to
improve the treatment effect of patients. In recent years, with the development and the improvement of various
imaging technologies, the identification accuracy of benign or malignant tumors of liver has been continuously
improved [2]. Ultrasonic technology is commonly used in diagnosing and identifying the benign and malignant
lesions, but the diagnosis of patient’s disease is often carried out through years of clinical experience. Therefore, the
hidden knowledge found from the medical images has a significant meaning to help doctors to diagnose the diseases.
The B ultrasound image of human liver parenchyma consists of small echo spots which are the basic units of
liver texture. The structure of each spot is similar. The echo spots of normal liver are uniformly distributed. When a
liver disease occurs, the micro structure of liver will be changed. The differences of the spot sizes and the
distribution can be seen in ultrasound images, which will cause the difference of image texture. The texture is an
important attribute of images and it is the image that is produced by the changes of image pixel colors or grayscale
in space. The feature extraction is the basic work of some research contents such as the recognition and
classification of images, the image retrieval based on content and the image data mining. The texture feature of
images is of great significance to describe the image contents and the extraction of texture feature has become a
hotspot in the study of image field [3]. In 1970s, Haralicket has proposed the Grey Level Co-occurrence Matrix
method (GLCM) [4] which is considered as the most typical algorithm for texture feature extraction. GLCM is
widely applied. For example, Huang Jing [5] has selected the optimal spacing and direction angle to conduct the
feature extraction and analysis through combining with the image characteristics and the experimental data. Li Lulu
[6] has proposed the texture image segmentation method of CLCM and MRF based on combined grey level

Advances in Materials, Machinery, Electronics I

AIP Conf. Proc. 1820, 060011-1–060011-6; doi: 10.1063/1.4977326
Published by AIP Publishing. 978-0-7354-1488-4/$30.00

060011-1
information. GLCM has been widely applied in medical field. In literature [7-9], the application of GLCM in
medical image has been studied. But most of these applications are lack of the scientific and effective classification
mechanism.
Based on the analysis of liver ultrasound images, the neural network model based on GLCM and LM has been
proposed through combining with the enhancement and denosing algorithm in this paper. Meanwhile, the
effectiveness of the algorithm has been verified through the experiment in medical liver images.

Image of primary liver cancer (b) Normal liver image

FIGURE 1. B ultrasound images of liver

ANALYSIS ON TEXTURE FEATURES OF THE B ULTRASOUND IMAGES OF

LIVER BASED ON GLCM

Pretreatment of Liver B Ultrasound

The B ultrasound images of liver are generally 768*576 grayscale images. In addition to the interested liver,
there also contain some background regions in original image. The horizontal and vertical projection methods are
employed to obtain the areas of interest. The images should be conducted the enhancement and denosing processing
such as histogram equalization and median filtering.

Constructing GLCM and Extracting Texture Features

The Grey-Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) is a matrix that presents a certain relationship of the adjacent
pixels in a local area or the entire area or the two pixel gray levels in a certain distance in a statistical description
image. The element values in this matrix represent the joint conditional probability density SL M G T  among
the gray levels. It refers to the probability (i.e. frequency) of j grey level in the given space d and the direction T
through taking i as the starting point.
Assuming that f(x, y) is a B ultrasound image of liver, the size is M×N and the grey level is G, the grey level co-
occurrence matrix that satisfies a certain space relationship is:

3 [ M   ^[ \  [  \    0 u 1 I[  \   L I[  \   M` (1)

In which #(x) represents the number of elements in collection x and P is the matrix of G×G. If the distance
between (x1, y1) and (x2, y2) is d and the angle of them and the coordinate horizontal axis is θ, the GLCM of
   
various distances and angles will be LM G T , in which the value of element L M (represents the number of
times for two pixels with a distance of d to appear in the direction of the angle. The grey level of the first pixel is i
and the other grey level of the second pixel is j.
After getting the co-occurrence matrix through calculating the liver image, it is necessary to calculate the texture
feature values. Haraliek has proposed 14 characteristics that are used in analyzing the grey level co-occurrence
matrix.
The commonly used feature statistics that are used to extract the texture information in remote sensing images
are: Homogeneity, Contrast, Dissimilarity, Entropy, Angular Second Moment, Correlation, Mean and Variance, etc.

060011-2
 1) Contrast: it is used to reflect the clarity of images and the groove depth of textures. Meanwhile, it is also
applied in showing the distribution of matrix values and the local changes in images. In grey level co-occurrence
matrix, the larger the element value that is far from the diagonal line is, the deeper the texture groove will be. And
the effect will be much clearer.

TXDQWN TXDQWN
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2) Homogeneity: it is also called the inverse difference moment which is the metric of the local grey uniformity
in images. If the local grayscale of image is uniform, the value of homogeneity will be larger.

TXDQWN TXDQWN

+RPRJHQHLW\ ¦ M¦
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(3)

3) Entropy: it is the metric of the information content in images and it is also the feature parameter to measure
distribution randomness of grey levels. The entropy represents the complexity of texture in images. The more
complex the texture is, the greater the entropy will be. On the contrary, the more uniform the grayscale is, and the
smaller the entropy will be.

TXDQWN TXDQWN
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4) Correlation is used to describe the similarity between lines or rows in GLCM. It reflects the extension of the
gray value along a certain direction. The longer the extension is, the greater the correlation will be. It is a metric of
gray linear relationship.

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&RUUHODWLRQ ¦ ¦ (5)
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GLCM provides the information of the direction, the interval and the changing amplitude of image grayscale, but
it cannot directly provide the texture characteristics. Therefore, it is required to extract the statistical properties that
are used to describe the texture features based on GLCM.
For the liver image after enhancement processing, the co-occurrence matrix in four directions
     is generated. It is necessary to extract the corresponding texture features of each co-
R R R R

occurrence matrix. For each feature, it is required to calculate the mean value and the mean square error in four
directions to obtain 22 texture features such as contrast, correlation, energy and homogeneity that have nothing to do
with the rotation direction.

Decrease-dimension Analysis of Principal Components

For the extracted texture features of liver B ultrasound images, not every feature is applicable to distinguish the
sample images. For a certain feature, the sample value with significant difference is the effective characteristic.
Otherwise, it is the redundant feature. In order to extract the effective features, it is required to decrease the
dimension.
PCA (Principal Components Analysis) is a commonly-used decrease-dimension method in image processing.
Due to the large number of variables and the correlation between variables, the complexity of analyzing the
problems will be increased.

060011-3
 PCA is a mathematical decrease-dimension method in which several comprehensive variables are found out to
replace the original numerous variables. These comprehensive variables should represent the information content of
the original variables as possible and they are not relevant.
According to the feature values of relevant correlation matrix, the contribution rate of the first principal
component is 99.9284%, the contribution rate of the second principal component is 0.0602%, the contribution rate
of the third principal component is 0.0111%, the contribution rate of the fourth principal component is 0.0002% and
the contribution rate of other components is 0. Therefore, this set of data can be summarized by the first three
principal components.

FIGURE 2. Principal component analysis of liver B ultrasound image

In figure 2, it is found that in the four texture features, the difference of contrast is relatively large when the liver
lesions occur. Especially for liver cancer, the contrast is particularly prominent. When there is hepatic hemangioma,
the changes of homogeneity and correlation mean value are obvious. However, the differences of other texture
features are not greatly changed when the liver is abnormal and the feature curves are overlapped. The fluctuations
are more obvious when there is liver cancer.

DIAGNOSIS OF LIVER DISEASES BY ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORK BASED

ON LM
The neural network BP learning algorithm has the ability to approximate any nonlinear continuous mapping in
theory and it has been widely applied in the modeling of nonlinear systems and the control field. However, the BP
algorithm has some shortcomings and the convergence speed is very slow. It is always converged to local minima.
The numerical stability is poor. The learning rate, the momentum coefficient and the initial weights are difficult to
be adjusted. The non-linear neural network learning algorithm LM can effectively overcome these defects existing
in the BP algorithm.
LM (Levenberg-Marquardt) algorithm is the combination of Gauss-Newton method and the steepest descent
method which has the local convergence of Gauss-Newton method and the global characteristics of gradient descent
method. The convergence feature is realized by adaptive adjustment damping factors and it has higher iterative
convergence rate. The stable and reliable solutions can be obtained in many nonlinear optimization problems.

EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
In this paper, the experiment employs the data set of B ultrasound images of human liver. 124 cases including
normal liver images and abnormal liver images are randomly selected and the simulation environment is Matlab
2014b. According to the above method, the preprocessing and the feature extraction for typical case images have
been respectively conducted. 22 texture features such as the mean values and the mean square deviation of contrast,
correlation, energy and homogeneity in four directions have been stored in image feature database. And only three
attributes are retained as the diagnostic input after dimension reduction.
The texture feature database after being processed has been analyzed by LM artificial neural network so as to
obtain the confusion matrix and the ROC curves, as shown in figure 4 and figure 5.

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 Confusion Matrix

28 1 8 1 73.7%
1
38.9% 1.4% 11.1% 1.4% 26.3%

0 20 1 0 95.2%
2
0.0% 27.8% 1.4% 0.0% 4.8%
Output Class

0 0 0 0 NaN%
3
0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% NaN%

0 0 0 13 100%
4
0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 18.1% 0.0%

100% 95.2% 0.0% 92.9% 84.7%

0.0% 4.8% 100% 7.1% 15.3%

1 2 3 4
Target Class

FIGURE 3. Confusion matrix FIGURE 4. ROC curve of LM neural network diagnosis

From Fig. 3 and Fig. 4, it can be concluded that the accuracy of LM artificial neural network analysis is 84.7%
for the whole liver image. The accuracy rate was 92.9%, harmonic mean F_mean was 90.9%, and recipient
operating characteristics (ROC) was 85.3% in the judgment of malignant tumor (Liver Cancer). The ROC curve is
closer to the upper left corner, and the classifier performance is better.
In addition, the real life, to determine whether the liver is normal also affected by the shooting position, shooting
equipment, and many other reasons.

CONCLUSION
The gray scale of medical image is high, and it contains a great deal of clinical information about texture features.
When the liver lesions, the image texture rough, and normal liver texture characteristics are quite different.
Therefore, the liver texture features of the image content is better distinguish, the results of feature extraction
provide a quantitative basis for the clinical diagnosis of liver diseases.
The experimental results show that the liver B-texture feature diagnosis method based on the LM neural network
provides a new method for the diagnosis and differential diagnosis of liver diseases. It provides reference for the
diagnosis of benign and malignant liver diseases, and provides a reference for the design and adjustment of
therapeutic regimen.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This paper is supported by the Science and Technology Plan Fund of Shandong Province (Item number:
J13LN56)

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