A complex diffusion based modified fuzzy C- means approach for segmentation of ultrasound image in presence of speckle noise for breast cancer detection

Abstract

This paper proposes a single framework for segmentation of abnormalities for breast cancer detection from Ultrasound images in presence of Rayleigh noise i.e. noise removal and segmentation are embedded in single step. It accomplishes dual purpose in a single framework simultaneously for the preprocessing and segmentation. The proposed framework comprises of two terms, first term, is used for segmentation which is a modified fuzzy c-means segmentation (MFCM) approach while second term is an adaptive complex diffusion based non linear filter (ACDPDE) that performs as regularization function for removal of Rayleigh noise, enhancement, and edge preservation of ultrasound Image. The various existing segmentation methods viz. K-Means, Texture based, Fuzzy C-Means (FCM), total variation based FCM (TVFCM), Adaptive fourth order PDE based FCM (AFPDEFCM), and the proposed method are evaluated for 50 sample ultrasound images of breast cancer. The region of interest (ROI) segmented image of ultrasound breast tissue is compared with ground truth images. From the acquired results and its analysis, it is observed that the proposed method is more robust and provides better segmentation result for ultrasound images in terms of various performance measures such as Global Constancy error (GCE), Tanimoto coefficient, Variation of Information (VOI), Probability Random Index (PRI), Jaccard coefficient, accuracy, True Positive Rate (TPR), False Positive Rate (FPR), True Negative Rate (TNR), dice index, False Negative Rate (FNR), and Area under curve (AUC). The proposed approach is capable of handling segmentation problem of blocky artifacts while achieving good tradeoff between Rayleigh noise removal and edge preservation. The proposed method may be useful for finding additional 33%cases of breast cancer which is missed or not detected by mammography.