Liver Cancer Detection using Machine Learning: A Review

Aishwarya T Gowtham H S Harshitha S Subodh Surendra

Assistant Professor 4VV20IS402 4VV20IS404 4VV15IS057
Dept of ISE, Dept of ISE, Dept of ISE, Dept of ISE,
VVCE, Mysuru VVCE, Mysuru. VVCE, Mysuru VVCE, Mysuru
Email: Email: Email: Email:
aishwarya.t@vvce.ac.in gowthamhs07@gmail.com harshithanayak814@gmail.com Subodhsuri123@gmail.com

Abstract
Liver cancer is a life-threatening illness and one of the fastest-growing cancer types in the world. Consequently, the early detection
of liver cancer leads to lower mortality rates. This work aims to build a model that will help clinicians determine the type of tumor
when it occurs within the liver region by analyzing images of tissue taken from a biopsy of this tumor. Working within this stage
requires effort, time, and accumulated experience that must be possessed by a tissue expert to determine whether this tumor is
malignant and needs treatment. Thus, a histology expert can make use of this model to obtain an initial diagnosis. This study aims
to propose a deep learning model using convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which are able to transfer knowledge from pre-
trained global models and decant this knowledge into a single model to help diagnose liver tumors from CT scans.
Keywords - Liver diagnosis, Machine learning, Expert System

Introduction
Cancer is a general term that includes a wide range of diseases
that can affect any part of the body. Cancer is considered a
leading cause of death worldwide, claiming nearly 10 million
lives in 2020, or approximately 1 in 6 deaths. One of the most
common types of cancer is liver cancer. The American Cancer
Society estimates that about 30,520 people (20,420 men and
10,100 women) will die of liver cancer [1] at the end of 2022.
Liver cancer causes more deaths than other types of cancer, and
the disease is usually diagnosed when it is in its advanced
stages. Therefore, diagnosing this disease at an early stage leads
to better treatment options. This paper proposes an efficient
method for the early detection of liver cancer. Non-invasive
procedures such as CT scans, MRI, and ultrasound are used to
identify liver cancer. The CT scan is a type of X-ray that
produces detailed images of your body. This scan can provide
information on the size, shape, and location of any type of liver
or abdominal tumor, as well as the blood arteries that surround
them. CT scans can also be used to precisely direct a biopsy
needle into a potentially cancerous tumor [2]. MRI
scansproduce comprehensive images of the soft
tissues of the body. In addition, they employ radio waves and
powerful magnets rather than X-rays. MRI scans can be very
useful in the investigation of liver tumors. They can
occasionally distinguish between benign and malignant tumors.
They can also be used to detect blockages in the blood arteries
in and around the liver, as well as to determine whether liver
cancer has migrated to other parts of the body [3,4]. Ultrasound
is usually used as the initial diagnosis when examining the liver.
It generates an image on a computer screen by using sound
waves. This test can detect liver tumors, which can then be
evaluated for cancer if necessary [5].
Related Work:
The liver is the second largest organ in the body, located on the
right side of the abdomen, and weighs about three pounds. The
liver has two lobes, right and left, and is in contact with the
gallbladder, pancreas, and intestines. Several organs are
involved with the liver. Cancer in the liver may be primary
(originating from various cells that compose the liver),
secondary, or metastatic (caused by cancerous cells from other
organs). Malignant hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most
typical primary liver disease among all liver cancers. The
second most common global disease is liver cancer. According
to data from the World Health Organization (WHO), it
accounted for 8.8 million deaths in 2015, out of which 788,000
deaths were caused by carcinoma [1]. The American Cancer
Society (ACS) predicted that around 20,710 new cases in the
USA would be diagnosed in the year (29,200 in men and 11,510
in women). Out of these, 28,920 people (19,610 men and 9310
women) died because of primary carcinoma and intrahepatic
epithelial canal cancer in 2017 [2] Researchers in the past have
investigated this topic. Masuda et al. [1] showed that by
enhancing contrast levels and using the expectation
maximization of the posterior marginal algorithm as well as a
shape constrain, liver tumors can be detected even in poor CT
images. Pescia et al. [2] proposed the use of advanced non-
linear machine learning techniques to determine the optimal
features, as well as the hyperplane that uses these features to
separate tumor voxels from healthy liver tissues. Bilello et al.
[3] showed that liver. In [4], the authors proposed a
segmentation model based on triplane-views, comprising axial,
sagittal and coronal plane axes. These interconnected planes
form an input stream to feed the con-vNet model. Multi-axis
input streams resulted in the richness of input information to
assist segmentation results.
Automatic tumor segmentation methods do hold a certain
degree of dominance if compared to manual methods because
of some evident reasons. Traditional segmentation techniques
are prolonged with a time constraint [4]. These are tedious, and
computationally expensive as well in some cases. Another
drawback of these techniques is that sometimes these
approaches overlook an existing tumor and fail to detect it due

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to its microscopic size. Also, traditional segmentation does not
efficiently differentiate between the tumor cell and normal cell
due to analogy [5]. There can be low contrast levels, equipment
issues, blurred edges, smudged cells, ambiguous boundaries,
and other spatial factors that impact handpicked features in
traditional segmentation [6]. This provides more room for error
rates and inaccurate results. Irregularity in the shape and size of
the tumor also varies from person to person. In low-level
images, it becomes a challenging task to detect and segment out
tumors effectively. On the other hand, the modality of
automatic methods is speedy, precise, and efficient. Automatic
methods have highly impacted the procedure of liver tumor
detection and segmentation for being quick. Therefore, research
has taken a shift from traditional segmentation methods to
automatic segmentation methods. The optimal design of
automatic liver tumor segmentation is of much more use today
rather than a well-built design of traditional liver segmentation.
CNN based Feature Extraction In this implementation,
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) based feature
extraction method is adopted to obtain the more accurate
features. These features are like diameter, length, width, area
and perimeter of the leaves. Flavia data set is applied as the
input training images for the CNN. The performance of CNN
based approach is far better than the hand-crafted features of
the previous approaches. The CNN architecture is shown in the
figure
This CNN algorithm was implemented on falvia dataset used as
the training images with 1800 leaves to extract the features from
32 different species. Here we have used 4 layer CNN model.
The CNN architecture is shown in figure 3.1 the network layers
are given below. i) Input Layer The input data set vector (p) is
fed to this layer. Its dimensions are 5x1. ii) Radial Basis Layer
In this layer, the vector distance (n) is calculated between the
vector p and the weight vector ω. It is implemented as the dot
product. ni = || ωi − pi ||·∗pi (1) radial basis (ni) = exp (-ni 2 )
(2) Where i is the row number of the vector. iii) Some
characteristics of Radial Basis Layer ni=1, if pi is identical with
ωi In this case, its output weights in the competitive layer will
pass their values to the competitive function. iv) Competitive
Layer The output vector d = n.*Mi . (3) The competitive
function C is calculated from d. C equals to 1 at the largest
element of d and 0 elsewhere. It is used as the index to look for
the scientific name of this liver. ii. Machine Learning based
classification Classification is the final step in the automatic
liver recognition process. This classification process can be
implemented using the various machine learning algorithms
like Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Support Vector
Machines (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbour (KNN) and Naive
Bayes (NB).
SVM [7] classification is characterized by an isolating hyper
plane. The concept of SVM classification can be understand
easily from the following training data set which is described
into two different classes, D = {(x1 , y 1 ), (x2 , y 2 ) .. (x k , y
k ), xi ϵ Rm, yi ϵ [+1, -1] (4) + b = 0 (5) The set of vectors is
said to be optimally separated by the hyper plane (Eq. (5)) if the
separation error is ‘0’ and the distance function is maximal.
Now a day’s ANN [8] is the most widely used research method
in the machine learning process. This concept of ANN has the
similarity with the human brain neurons system. Performance
of ANN depends on the neuron count and hidden layers. In this
implementation, feed forward neural network with a single
hidden layer was used. In training phase, the system uses the
default Scaled Conjugate Gradient function. The minimum
gradient is used for stopping criteria. Also, KNN method can be
used for the liver species recognition. KNN algorithm [9-10] is
based on distance measure metrics in feature space. KNN
classifier at first determines k nearest neighbors and then
determines labels for the sample based on neighbor weight.
Bayesian classifier is a statistical approach. It performs the
classification based on the concept of probability. Accuracy of
Bayesian classifier method is less due to its conditional
independence of Bayesian probability. 4. SIMULATION
RESULTS The experiment is carried out on the 10 different
liver species [16] as shown in table 1. The table 2 shows the
classification report (Precision, Recall, F1-Score & Support)
[17] obtained using the proposed algorithm. The following are
the metrics that are used in the classification process. i.
Precision is the ratio of correctly predicted positive
observations to the total predicted positive observations.
Precision (P) = TP/ (TP+FP) TPTrue Positives FPFalse
Positives ii. Recall is the fraction of positives that are correctly
identified. Recall(R) = TP/ (TP+FN) FN False Negatives iii.
F1-Score is created by finding the harmonic mean of precision
and recall. F1-Score = 2*(R * P)/(R + P) iv. Support is the
number of occurrences in each class.
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Proposed system
Proposed system is an automation Liver Cancer prediction
using deep learning techniques. The motive of this method is to
initiate deep learning based framework with CNN architecture
and execute the investigation for image classification of Liver
Cancer. This efficient deep learning process will provide us
some insights into the neuronal pathology of autistic children,
and also help the diagnosis of the early stage of Liver Cancer in
children.
We have taken some initial results on detecting Liver Cancer
from Brain X-Rays using a deep-learning model. We neded
demonstrated significant improvement in performance over
Liver Cancer -Net, the only publicly maintained tool for
classification of LIVER CANCER X-rays, on the same Brain-
xray-dataset. The results look promising, though the size of the
publicly available dataset is small. We plan to further validate
our approach using larger LIVER CANCER-ray image datasets • Convolutional neural networks apply a filter to an input to
and clinical trials.
Methodologies:
Collection datasets:
• We are going to collect datasets for the prediction from
the kaggle.com
• The data sets consists of many Classess
Data Pre Processing:
• In data pre-processing we are going to perform some
image pre-processing techniques on the selected data
• Image Resize
• And Splitting data into train and test
Data Modelling:
• The splitted train data are passed as input to the
CNN algorithm, which helps in training.
• The trained liver image data evaluated by passing
test data to the algorithm
• Accuracy is calculated
Build Model:
• Once the data is trained and if it showing the
accuracy rate as high, then we need to build model
file
CNN:
Convolutional Neural Networks have the following layers:
o Convolutional
o ReLU Layer
o Pooling
o Fully Connected Layer
Step1: Convolution Layer:
create a feature map that summarizes the presence of detected
features in the input.
•
Step2 : ReLU Layer
In this layer, we remove every negative value from the filtered
images and replaces them with zeros.It is happening to avoid
the values from adding up to zero.
Rectified Linear unit(ReLU) transform functions only
activates a node if the input is above a certain quantity. While
the data is below zero, the output is zero, but when the
information rises above a threshold. It has a linear relationship
with the dependent variable.
Step3: Pooling Layer
In the layer, we shrink the image stack into a smaller size.
Pooling is done after passing by the activation layer. We do by
implementing the following 4 steps:
o Pick a window size (often 2 or 3)
o Pick a stride (usually 2)
o Walk your Window across your filtered images
o From each Window, take the maximum value
Step4: Fully Connected Layer
The last layer in the network is fully connected, meaning that
neurons of preceding layers are connected to every neuron in
subsequent layers.
This mimics high-level reasoning where all possible pathways
from the input to output are considered.
Then, take the shrunk image and put into the single list, so we
have got after passing through two layers of convolution relo
and pooling and then converting it into a single file or a vector.
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 Step4: Fully Connected Layer

Convolutional Neural Networks have the following layers:

o Convolutional
o ReLU Layer
o Pooling
The last layer in the network is fully connected, meaning that
o Fully Connected Layer neurons of preceding layers are connected to every neuron in
subsequent layers.

This mimics high-level reasoning where all possible pathways

from the input to output are considered.

Then, take the shrunk image and put into the single list, so we
have got after passing through two layers of convolution relu
and pooling and then converting it into a single file or a vector.

Step1: Convolution Layer:

• Convolutional neural networks apply a filter to an input to
create a feature map that summarizes the presence of detected
features in the input.
Step2 : ReLU Layer

In this layer, we remove every negative value from the filtered

images and replaces them with zeros.It is happening to avoid
the values from adding up to zero.

Rectified Linear unit(ReLU) transform functions only

activates a node if the input is above a certain quantity. While
the data is below zero, the output is zero, but when the
information rises above a threshold. It has a linear relationship
with the dependent variable.

Step3: Pooling Layer

In the layer, we shrink the image stack into a smaller size.

Pooling is done after passing by the activation layer. We do by
implementing the following 4 steps:

o Pick a window size (often 2 or 3)

o Pick a stride (usually 2)
o Walk your Window across your filtered images
o From each Window, take the maximum value

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Table1.1 Summary of the papers reviewed

Paper datatype Result limitation

An Efficient Liver Xray image datasets They perform clustering on our It is evident that the accuracy
Tumor Detection collected dataset and extract LBP of SVM is 85% and the
using Machine features as well as HOG features from Ensemble is 49%. Both of
Learning these clusters. Furthermore, we perform these values are low as
classification which is based on these accuracy.
extracted features using KNN.
Furthermore, they have compared our
results with two classifiers namely
SVM and Ensemble to achieve a better
understanding. Our proposed technique
outperformed existing techniques and
showed encouraging results when
compared to other methods.
Accuracy :0.85

Liver Cancer CT images of the liver between method includes the successful The datasets used for this
Detection using liver metastases of colorectal extraction of features from Inception project are very less in
Hybridized Fully cancer and benign cysts has combined with residual and pre-trained number and feature
Convolutional Neural been analyzed. weights. Feature maps have been extraction results are not that
Network based on consistent with the original image voxel much accuracte.
Deep learning features, and The importance of features
framework seemed to represent the most relevant
imaging criteria for every class.
Accuracy:0.92

Deep Learning magnetic resonance imaging This study proposed a more efficient Despite the Res-UNet
Approach for Liver (MRI), computer tomography method for segmenting liver and tumors producing very promising
and Tumor (CT) from CT image volumes using a hybrid results, there are a few
Segmentation in CT ResUNet model, combining the ResNet limitations. We may get
Images Using and UNet models to address this gap. around these limitations by
ResUNet planning for more epochs,
using more data, using
different datasets, or using
different preprocessing
strategies.

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Liver Tumor 3D computed tomography The mean VO of tumor segmentation is The distance between f(x)
Detection and (CT) images 67.15%. The improvement over and the label indicates the
Segmentation using traditional ELM in mean VO is 5%. class type. The oneclass
Kernel-based Compared with the performance ELM shows that it is
Extreme Learning degrades slightly possible to detect tumors
Machine even there is no tumor data
for training. We have also
compared the performance
of one class tumor
detection and two-class
ELM using cross validation
detection.

Liver Tumor CT scan Image datasets proposed method hasimproved the Test size f data is less
Segmentation using segmentation rate by providing
Resnet based Mask- segmentation accuracy with average
R-CNN dice coefficient, JC, VOE and RVD of
0.95, 0.41, 0.12, and 0.15, respectively
and lesser training time due to converted
CT image slices instead of training on
CT volumes.

Automatic Detection CT scans The proposed model achieved an Activate function can be
of Liver Cancer Using accuracy of 99.5% on both datasets, used according to data.
Hybrid Pre-Trained which is better than the results of other
Models models used in this field

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Conclusion
we used CNN and deep learning methods for the feature
extraction and classification of liver diseasespecies. The
different machine learning algorithms are ANN, SVM, KNN
and Naive Bayes (NB). We have considered the Flavia dataset
in this method. This data sets used for both and training and
testing purpose. It has been achieved an accuracy of 98%. All
the performance metrics like precision, recall, F1-score and
support are calculated. Also the achieved training and
validation accuracies are nearly equal. Images used in the
training purpose are small and gray scale images. As a future
work it is possible to implement the colour image classification
for liver diseaserecognition.
This paper presents the convolutional neural network (CNN)
method for liver cancer and lesion identification and
segmentation. Various layers in the neural network are utilized
to extract features of medical images to improve the accuracy
of the detection of medical images. 2D feature maps are
combined with several slices in the featureextraction process.
The algorithm showed very accurate liver volume
measurements of 97.22%. The study showed a high accuracy of
the segmentation method had an average Dice coefficient of
0.92. The results show that the FCN produces the best results
with data changes, adjacent slices, and appropriate class
weights. Note that a limited dataset and testing have been done
3 fold cross-validation. A Convolutional Neural Network is
trained to identify tumors and healthy voxels on all base-line
liver maskings. CNN is used to generate the follow-up
segmentation of tumors as a voxel classifier. The segmentation
leaks are then eliminated in the resulting segmentation so that
the final results can be obtained. The proposed
HFCNN method has high accuracy in terms of identifying liver
tumors.
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