Identification of breast malignancy by marker-controlled watershed transformation and hybrid feature set for healthcare

Breast cancer is a highly prevalent disease in females that may lead to mortality in severe cases. The mortality can be subsided if breast cancer is diagnosed at an early stage. The focus of this study is to detect breast malignancy through computer-aided diagnosis (CADx). In the first phase of this work, Hilbert transform is employed to reconstruct B-mode images from the raw data followed by the marker-controlled watershed transformation to segment the lesion. The methods based only on texture analysis are quite sensitive to speckle noise and other artifacts. Therefore, a hybrid feature set is developed after the extraction of shape-based and texture features from the breast lesion. Decision tree, k-nearest neighbor (KNN), and ensemble decision tree model via random under-sampling with Boost (RUSBoost) are utilized to segregate the cancerous lesions from the benign ones. The proposed technique is tested on OASBUD (Open Access Series of Breast Ultrasonic Data) and breast ultrasound (BUS) images collected at Baheya Hospital Egypt (BHE). The OASBUD dataset contains raw ultrasound data obtained from 100 patients containing 52 malignant and 48 benign lesions. The dataset collected at BHE contains 210 malignant and 437 benign images. The proposed system achieved promising accuracy of 97% with confidence interval (CI) of 91.48% to 99.38% for OASBUD and 96.6% accuracy with CI of 94.90% to 97.86% for the BHE dataset using ensemble method.