Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine
Volume 2012, Article ID 348135, 17 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/348135
Abdominal Tumor Characterization and Recognition Using Superior-Order Cooccurrence Matrices, Based on Ultrasound Images
1Department of Computer Science, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, George Baritiu Street 26–28, 400027 Cluj-Napoca, Romania
2Department of Ultrasonography, Iuliu Hatieganu University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Victor Babeş Street 8, 400079 Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Received 2 September 2011; Accepted 18 September 2011
Academic Editor: Maria Crisan
Copyright © 2012 Delia Mitrea et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
The noninvasive diagnosis of the malignant tumors is an important issue in research nowadays. Our purpose is to elaborate computerized, texture-based methods for performing computer-aided characterization and automatic diagnosis of these tumors, using only the information from ultrasound images. In this paper, we considered some of the most frequent abdominal malignant tumors: the hepatocellular carcinoma and the colonic tumors. We compared these structures with the benign tumors and with other visually similar diseases. Besides the textural features that proved in our previous research to be useful in the characterization and recognition of the malignant tumors, we improved our method by using the grey level cooccurrence matrix and the edge orientation cooccurrence matrix of superior order. As resulted from our experiments, the new textural features increased the malignant tumor classification performance, also revealing visual and physical properties of these structures that emphasized the complex, chaotic structure of the corresponding tissue.