Biomedical Engineering: Applications, Basis and Communications, Vol. 29, No.

6 (2017) 1750047 (12 pages)

DOI: 10.4015/S1016237217500478

DELINEATION AND CLASSIFICATION OF

LIVER CANCER USING LEVEL SET METHOD
IN CT IMAGES

Amita Das*, S. S. Panda† and Sukanta Sabut‡,§

*Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering
SOA University, India
Biomed. Eng. Appl. Basis Commun. 2017.29. Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com

†
Department of Surgical Oncology, IMS & SUM Hospital
by UNIVERSITY OF NEW ENGLAND on 01/02/18. For personal use only.

SOA University, India

‡
Department of Electronics Engineering
Ramrao Adik Institute of Technology
Navi Mumbai, India

Accepted 28 October 2017

Published 18 December 2017

ABSTRACT
The paper proposes a modi¯ed approach of delineation and classi¯cation of two di®erent types of liver cancers viz.
Hepatocellular Carcinoma (HCC) and Metastatic Carcinoma (MET) from di®erent slices of computed tomography
(CT) scans images. A combined framework of reorganization and extraction of region of interest (ROI), texture feature
extraction followed by texture classi¯cation by di®erent machine learning approaches has been presented. Initially,
adaptive thresholding has been applied to segment the liver region from CT images. Level set algorithm has been used
for detecting the region of cancer tissues. In the classi¯cation stage, the delineated output lesions have been extracted
with 38 features to build up the dataset. Two machine learning classi¯ers, support vector machine (SVM) and random
forest (RF), have been used to train the dataset for correct prediction of cancer classes. Ten-fold cross-validation has
been used to evaluate the performance of two classi¯ers. The e±ciency of the proposed algorithm is tested in terms
of accuracy, where the RF classi¯er achieved a higher accuracy of 95% compared to SVM classi¯er of 87%.
The experimental result proves the superiority of RF classi¯er compared to SVM classi¯er with level-set features.

Keywords: CT images; Liver tumor; Hepatocellular carcinoma; Metastatic carcinoma; Segmentation; Classi¯er.

INTRODUCTION systems improved the diagnosis e±ciency of the radi-

Liver cancer is a dangerous nontransmissible diseases
that causes 13% of total deaths among all the diseases
universally.1 Early and accurate detection of the disease
is helpful in the treatment process of hepatocellular
carcinoma, liver metastasis cancer. Di®erent causes that
a®ect the liver cancer have been described in detail.2
In automatic diagnosis process, the computer-aided
ologists. The image segmentation process e®ectively
separates the region of interest such as liver tumors.
Various methods such as contour-based, region-based
and clustering approach have been applied successfully
in the segmentation process. In region-based segmenta-
tion process, the images are divided based on intensity,
spatial and connectivity data of image pixels. Di®erent
machine learning approaches like arti¯cial neural network

§
Corresponding author: Sukanta Sabut, Department of Electronics Engineering, Ramrao Adik Institute of Technology, Navi
Mumbai, India. E-mail: sukanta207@gmail.com

1750047-1
 A. Das, S. S. Panda & S. Sabut

(ANN), support vector machine (SVM) and intelligent
algorithms have been found e®ective in classifying the
diseases in the decision-making process.3,4
Gupta et al.5 proposed an e®ective hybrid segmen-
tation method based on Gaussian kernel induced fuzzy
C-means (GKFCM) clustering the object boundaries.
Hoogi et al.6 proposed an adaptive level-set segmenta-
tion technique that improved the dice similarity coe±-
cient (DSC) by 0:25
0:13% in detecting liver lesions in
233 Computed Tomography (CT) and MRI images.
Vishnuvarthanan et al.7 proposed a hybrid self-orga-
nizing map with fuzzy k-means (SOMFKM) technique
for segmenting malignant and benign tumors e±ciently
with high peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and low
Biomed. Eng. Appl. Basis Commun. 2017.29. Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com
local binary pattern histogram Fourier features and
classi¯ed with SVM and random forest to identify be-
tween hepatocellular carcinoma and metastasis carci-
noma. The proposed technique was evaluated in 40
images in carcinoma a®ected cancer. The e±ciency was
evaluated in terms of sensitivity, speci¯city and accu-
racy and the obtained results are compared with the
published literature data. The rest of the paper is
structured as follows: section Materials and Methods
includes the materials for the process, Classi¯cation
section includes di®erent methods applied for the seg-
mentation, Results section represents the result and last
section presents the conclusion of the work.

mean square error (MSE). Mohammed et al.8 proposed

an automatic segmentation method based on k-means MATERIALS AND METHODS
by UNIVERSITY OF NEW ENGLAND on 01/02/18. For personal use only.

clustering to identify nasopharyngeal carcinoma and

CT Scan Image Data
ANN, SVM techniques are used e®ectively to separate
benign and malignant tumors with an accuracy of The CT scan images from di®erent cancer patients are
90.10%. A modi¯ed distance regularized level set evo- collected from the department of Radiology, IMS and
lution (MDRLSE) has been used successfully to classify SUM hospital, Bhubaneswar. The parameters of the CT
four types of brain hemorrhages.9 scan images were as follows: slice thickness is 0.5 mm to
The watershed transform with MLP-NN classi¯er 1.5 mm and the size of the image is 512  512 pixels, an
with adjusted parameter of gives an accuracy of 94% in example is shown in Fig. 1. The CT image includes three
segmenting cancer region in liver (see Fig. 1).10 Rouhi types of phases: such as noncontrast enhanced phase,
et al.11 presented an initial segmentation process using arterial phase and portal phase. This study includes 20
SFC, improved RG, CNN followed by a ¯nal segmen- hepatocellular carcinoma and 20 metastasis carcinoma
tation using level set techniques to separate the ¯nal cases. HCC are small lesions and will appear in the ar-
tumor region. The benign and malignant breast tumors terial phase only whereas METS cells were shown in
of breast are classi¯ed successfully in NN, random forest, multiple lesions and appear in all the three phases.
support vector machine, and K-nearest neighbor.11–13
Koley et al.14 presented a rough entropy-based threshold-
ing with granular computing to delineate the tumor area. Segmentation
Eighty-six features used to classify with random forest The segmentation process consists of three steps: region
(RF) achieved high classi¯cation accuracy. Dubey et al.15 segmentation, feature extraction and classi¯cation. The
proposed an e®ective approach with rough set-based in-
tuitionist fuzzy c-means (RIFCM) clustering method for
brain MRI image segmentation. Sethi et al.16 presented
distance regularized level set evaluation (DRLSE) method
to segment a cancerous region segmentation in CT images.
Automatic brain tumor detection using region growing
approach and GLCM features achieved accuracy of
81.69% and sensitivity of 81.82%. Histogram matching
and Otsu thresholding indicate better perfection in seg-
menting the tumor region and reduced time complexity.18
Li et al.19 proposed a new uni¯ed level set model with fuzzy
clustering for e®ective solution in segmenting the liver
tumor region. A semi-automatic liver metastasis with
modi¯ed level set and statistical pixel classi¯cation was
found to be e®ective compared with the method.20
In this work, level set algorithms are applied to de-
lineate the cancerous region from extracted important Fig. 1 Sample slice of hepatocellular carcinoma case.

1750047-2
 Delineation and Classi¯cation of Liver Cancer

ADAPTIVE LESION LBP-HF

LEVEL-SET
HCC THRESHOLDING EXTRACTION FEATURES

HCC Support Vector

Machine (SVM)
MET
Biomed. Eng. Appl. Basis Commun. 2017.29. Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com

Random Forest
MET
(RF)
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Fig. 2 Flow diagram of CAD system.

°ow diagram of the proposed process is illustrated in
Fig. 2. The cancerous region was segmented with level
set and the LBP-HF features are computed from discrete
Fourier transforms of LBP histograms. In the CT image,
the contrast of the cancerous portion is less compared to
healthy tissues. The original abdominal images consist of
liver and some portion of kidney, spleen, etc. Initially,
adaptive thresholding is used to separate the liver from
the abdomen and adaptive thresholding and morpho-
logical operation are used to get the lesion.
Level Set Algorithm21,22
Observe a parametrized closed surface or planner curve
which is represented by Cðp; tÞ : ½0; 1  Rþ ! Rn . Here,
n ¼ 2, 3, accordingly, for planner curve or surface and t
de¯nes the arti¯cial time that is produced by the
movement of the curve C0 ðpÞ through its normal direc-
tion N. So, the equation of curve or surface is given in
Eq. (1)

set equation of variational LSMs is de¯ned in Eq. (4).
Ct ¼ F N
ð1Þ
Cðp; t ¼ 0Þ ¼ C0 ðP Þ:
Here, F represents the force function. The evaluation of
Eq. (1) is solved iteratively by using the Lagrangian
approach. But this iterative solving procedure may not
handle the topological changes done by moving front,
like splitting merging, etc. which is an intrinsic draw-
back of this approach. Another approach, Level set
Method, is applied to solve this problem. Accordingly,
in this approach, the closed moving front is represented
as CðtÞ ¼ X 2 Rn , which is a zero Level set of Level
set Function (LSF)
ðX; tÞ, therefore CðtÞ ¼ fxj
ðCðtÞ;
tÞ ¼ 0g. As
ðCðtÞ; tÞ ¼ 0, taking the derivative of
CðtÞ with respect to time t generates the following
equations:



t þ r
 Ct ¼
t þ r
 F N ¼ 0
ð2Þ

ðX; t ¼ 0Þ ¼
0 ðXÞ:
Here, the gradient term rðÞ , ð @ðÞ @ðÞ @ðÞ
@x1 ; @x2 ; . . . ; @xn Þ, and

0 ðxÞ are the initial Level set functions represented as
C0 ðpÞ ¼ fXj
0 ðXÞ ¼ 0g. As the inward normal was
represented as N ¼ r
=jr
j, Eq. (2) is rewritten as



t ¼ F jr
j
ð3Þ

ðX; t ¼ 0Þ ¼
0 ðXÞ:
In the traditional Level set methods, F is de¯ned as
F ¼
k þ F1 , where k ¼ divðr
=jr
jÞ represents cur-
vature. Equation (3) is the Level set equation which is
based on the fractional di®erential equation which is
derived from the geometric factor of motion. The Level



t ¼ E
ð
Þ ¼ F ð
Þ
ð4Þ

ðX; t ¼ 0Þ ¼
0 ðXÞ:
Here, E
ð
Þ represents the gateaux derivative of an
energy function Eð
Þ, and ð
Þ represents the Dirac
function. The force function F of Eqs. (3) and (4) is
approximated using the upwind scheme. Through the
evaluation, the LSF may be too °at or too steep close to
the zero Level set, which causes a numerical error.
Therefore, another re-initialization procedure was
employed to reshape the signed distance function (SDF).

1750047-3
 A. Das, S. S. Panda & S. Sabut

Re-initialization verses without One researcher Xie22 also proposed one level-set di®u-
re-initialization sion rate which is de¯ned as

Many researchers proposed the level set function as

ðXÞ ¼ 1
dist2 ðXÞ. Here, distðÞ is the distance func-
tion and sign
represents the inside and outside of the
contour. As re-initialization method computes directly
the SDF in the entire region, it is very much time con-
suming. So to reduce the computational complexity
many re-initialization methods were proposed, where the
SDF does not compute directly.24,25 As jr
j ¼ 1 is a
SDF, the following equation of re-initialization was
proposed:

t þ Sð
0 Þðjr
j  1Þ ¼ 0:
Biomed. Eng. Appl. Basis Commun. 2017.29. Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com
r2 ð
Þ ¼ H ðjr
j  1Þ: ð9Þ
Here, H ðzÞ ¼ ð1=2Þ½1 þ ð2=Þarctanðz=Þ and  is a
¯xed parameter.
By observing the above three di®usion rates we
conclude when jr
j  0:5, the di®usion rate restricted
the LSF to be an SDF. Again, when jr
j  0:5, the
di®usion rate creates °att LSF, by blocking the rising of
unwanted peaks and valleys. So, the di®erent di®usion
rate equations are combined with Eq. (4) and produce
the following LSE equations:
ð5Þ

t ¼ Regð
Þ þ F ð
Þ
ð10Þ
In the above equation, ð
0 Þ , pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi

0
, represents the
ðX; t ¼ 0Þ ¼
0 ðXÞ:
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2
0 þðxÞ
2

initial LSF, and x is the step size. Equation (5) will So, here Regð
Þ ¼
divðrð
Þr
Þ; rð
Þ ¼ r1 ð
Þ; r2 ð
Þ
also be unable to get a desirable ¯nal solution. This or r3 ð
Þ, and
is a constant term.
problem can be controlled by changing SðÞ into The Dirac function ð
Þ can be generated using the
pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
ð
Þ ,
=
2 þ jr
j2 ðxÞ2 . In totality, the re-initiali- following two terms:
zation was su®ering from many problems, like excessive 8
computational cost, it also blocks the rise of new con- <0;  z 2 R;   jZj > 
tours, etc. Therefore, some new methods have been 1; ðzÞ ¼ 1 z ð11Þ
: 1 þ cos ; jzj  ;
proposed, where the Level set functions are regularized 2 
without the re-initialization procedure.
1 
2; ðzÞ ¼  ; z 2 R: ð12Þ
 2 þ z 2

Distance regularized level-set evolution As 1; ðzÞ is limited into a zero level set neighborhood,
(DRLSE) LSE can act locally; on the contrary 2; ðzÞ acts on the
all level curves that is why the new contour appears
Li et al.21 proposed a signed distance function (SDF) in automatically.
Eq. (6).
Z
P ð
Þ ¼ ðjr
j  1Þ2 dx: ð6Þ Rotation Invariant Based Image

Descriptor
The above equation calculates the closeness in-between
This section emphasizes on rotation invariant image
SDF and LSF in the region   Rn , where n ¼ 2 or 3 by
features for texture description. As it depends on uni-
the properties of variation, the gradient of P ð
Þ is ac-
form local binary pattern, the LBP methodology is ¯rst
quired as
deeply reviewed.

t ¼ P
ð
Þ ¼ div½r1 ð
Þr
: ð7Þ

Here, Eq. (7) represents a di®usion equation with a ve- Local binary pattern operator
locity r1 ð
Þ ¼ 1  1=jr
j. A Local binary pattern (LBP) operator is a simple and
Although r1 ðÞ ! 1 when jrj ! 0, which is the e®ective technique for extracting texture features
reason of oscillation in the ¯eld LSF, so the problem is through an image.23 Generally, the operator labels the
resolved using a new di®usion rate. pixel of an image using thresholding a 3  3 neighbor-
8 hood. Di®erent size of neighborhood can be applied
> sinð2jr
jÞ
>
< ; if jr
j  1; for this operator. Here, we consider a circular neigh-
2jr
j
r2 ð
Þ ¼ ð8Þ borhood denoted by (P ; R), where P is the number
>
> 1
:1  ; if jr
j  1: of sampling points and R represents the radius of
jr
j
the circular neighborhood. Let fðx; yÞ be the center

1750047-4
 Delineation and Classi¯cation of Liver Cancer

10 130 204 0 1 1
Binary:01100010
18 127 102 0 0
Decimal:71
215 78 64 1 0 0

Fig. 3 Basic LBP operator.

pixel of a neighborhood and the sampling points lie at of 1-bit inside the pattern and r de¯nes the rotation of
coordinates the circular pattern. Currently suppose the neighbor-
     hood has P number of sampling points, therefore n
2p 2p
ðxP ; yP Þ ¼ x þ R cos ; y  R sin :
Biomed. Eng. Appl. Basis Commun. 2017.29. Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com

P P ranges from 0 to P þ 1. Therefore, `n' is in the range of

1  n  P  1, likewise the rotation of pattern or `r' is
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In this neighborhood, the intensity of the center pixel is

compared with the intensity of the other sampling points
presented in the neighborhood. The comparison is done
by using Eq. (10)
X
P 1
LBPP ;R ðx; yÞ ¼ sðfðx; yÞ  fðxp ; yp Þ2p ;

p¼0
1 x0
where sðzÞ ¼
0 x < 0:
Figure 3 shows the basic LBP operator. The main idea of
this method is the thresholding of a 3  3 neighborhood
and the results are shown in a binary number the his-
togram of the labels are used as a texture descriptor. The
resultant LBP operator is then extended to a uniform
pattern LBP operator where the LBP contains at most
two bitwise transition, that is, from 0 to 1 or vice versa.
The numerical examples of uniform patterns are
00010000 and 0100100. For simplicity of computation,
we consider only the uniform patterns, so that the de-
scriptor will reduce to 59 bins. In the uniform LBP his-
togram, rotation of input image by k*45 causes a cyclic
shift by k along each row. When the LBP histogram was
computed for an image, each and every uniform pattern
was used as a separate bin and a single bin was assigned
to all the nonuniform patterns. Figure 4 shows the 58
possible uniform patterns for a neighborhood of 8 sam-
pling points.24 So the uniform pattern-based rotation in-
variant LBP operator was denoted as LBPriu2 , which is
archived by circular rotation of each bit pattern. For
example, the bit sequences 11100000, 01110000, 00111000
appear from a unique rotation of the same pattern.
Rotation invariant descriptors from LBP
in the range 0  r  P  1.
Suppose I
ðx; yÞ indicates the rotation of the image
Iðx; yÞ by an angle of
. Within this rotation, the point
(x; y) rotates to another location, let ðx0 ; y0 Þ, the circular
sampling neighborhood of points Iðx; yÞ and I
ðx0 ; y0 Þ is
represented in Fig. 5.
ð13Þ
Although the rotation are restricted to integer mul-
tiples of the angles in-between the two sampling points.
i.e.
¼ a 360P ; a ¼ 0; 1; . . . ; P  1, this phenomenon
rotates the total sampling neighborhood into `a' dis-
create steps. Accordingly, when point (x; y) is changed
to point ðx0 ; y0 Þ, the uniform pattern UP ðn; rÞ is also
represented by UP ðn; r þ a mod P Þ of the rotated image.
Let us consider a uniform LBP histogram value hI as the
total number of occurrence of pattern UP ðn; rÞ inside the
image I. Based on the above lesion, if the image I is
rotated by an angle of
¼ a 360 P , then this rotation
causes a cyclic shift within the histogram along each
row.
hI
ðUP ðn; r þ a mod P ÞÞ ¼ hI ðUP ðn; rÞÞ: ð14Þ
For instance, within an eight neighbor LBP, if the image
is rotated by 45 , the value of the histogram bin U8 ð1;
0Þ ¼ 00000001b changes to bin U8 ð1; 1Þ ¼ 00000010b,
likewise the value from bin U8 ð1; 1Þ to bin U8 ð1; 2Þ, etc.
Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) is applied to
formulate these type of features. Let, Hðn; Þ will be
the DFT of nth row of the histogram hI ðUP ðn; rÞÞ, i.e.
de¯ned in Eq. (15)
X
P 1
Hðn; uÞ ¼ hI ðUp ðn; rÞÞei2ur=P ; ð15Þ
r¼0

histogram where UP ðn; rÞ are the uniform LBP patterns; n is the

Let Up ðn; rÞ denote a speci¯c kind of uniform LBP number of 1 bits in the pattern; r is the rotation of the
pattern.25 Here, in the pair ðn; rÞ, n de¯nes the number pattern; P is the number of neighboring sampling points.

1750047-5
 A. Das, S. S. Panda & S. Sabut
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Fig. 4 The 58 di®erent uniform patterns in (8, R) neighborhood.

According to the DFT rules, a cyclic change of the Here, Hðn2 ; uÞ represents the complex conjugate of
input vector can cause a phase change in DFT coe±- Hðn2 ; uÞ.
cient. If h0 ðUp ðn; rÞÞ ¼ hðUP ðn; r  aÞÞ then H 0 ðn; uÞ ¼ Any 1  n1 ; n2  P  1 and 0  u  P  1 are
Hðn; uÞei2ua=P . represented with Eq. (17)
And hence, with any 1 < n1 ; n2  P  1 the DFT is
LBPu2  HFðn1 ; n2 ; uÞ ¼ Hðn1 ; uÞHðn2 ; uÞ: ð17Þ
presented in Eq. (16)
H 0 ðn1 ; uÞH 0 ðn2 ; uÞ ¼ Hðn1 ; uÞe
i2ua
P H 0 ðn2 ; uÞe
i2ua
P
Here, the generated features are invariant to the cyclic
shift of the rows in hI ðUp ðn; rÞÞ and also invariant to the
¼ Hðn1 ; uÞHðn2 ; uÞ: ð16Þ rotating input image Iðx; yÞ. The Fourier magnitude
spectrum that is represented as LBP histogram Fourier
features (LBP-HF) is the special case of LBP features.
Moreover, the Fourier magnitude spectrum includes
hLBPriu2 features as a subset and is represented in
Eq. (18) as
X
P 1
jHðn; 0Þj ¼ hi ðUP ðn; rÞÞ ¼ hLBPriu2 ðnÞ: ð18Þ
r¼0

A detailed description of extracting local binary pat-

tern-based Fourier features (LBP-HF) descriptor is
used to extract 38 most e±cient features for texture
Fig. 5 E®ect of image rotation on points in circular neighborhoods. classi¯cation.25

1750047-6
 Delineation and Classi¯cation of Liver Cancer

CLASSIFICATION Random Forest

The extracted features are classi¯ed into hepatocellular
carcinoma or metastatic carcinoma in terms of accuracy,
sensitivity, speci¯city using SVM and random forest
classi¯ers.
SVM Classi¯er
Here, we outline some of the basic equations of SVM
classi¯er.26–28 Let xi from 1  i  Nx be the input vector
with certain binary labels yi 2 f1; 1g (This means yi
represents 1 if xi is in class 1 and it represents 1 if xi is
in class 2). Let
ðxi Þ be the vector in the feature
space.
ðxi Þ is the kernel mapping of the input vector
Biomed. Eng. Appl. Basis Commun. 2017.29. Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com
Breman30,31 developed a supervised learning algorithm
called random forest which is a powerful tool for classi-
¯cation of large dataset. It e®ectively calculates the
missing data from the dataset. Several tree structured
classi¯ers are grouped together to form an RF classi¯er
where each tree will depend on the values of sampled
random vectors. The procedure for building the trees in
random forest dataset is given below:
. If the training set will have N number of samples, the
trees are built by taking N samples randomly, called
boost strap samples.
. If the dataset consists of V number of features, then v is

and Kðxi ; xj Þ ¼
ðxi Þ 
ðxj Þ will be a kernel function. de¯ned v

V and at each node v the features are se-
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The optimizing function for a SVM classi¯er is presented lected from V set feature. Finally, a best feature is
in Eq. (19) chosen from v to split the node. Throughout the devel-
( ) opment process of forest, the v value does not change.
1 X
min ¼ jjwjj þ C
2
i : ð19Þ Algorithm of RF classifier 31
w;b 2 i

According to the constraints yi ðw  x þ bÞ ¼ 1  i and Need: S: Training dataset with N no. of samples,
i  0, w represents a normal vector which separates the S = (x i, y i)
hyper plane in the feature space and a regularization For i = 1, 2, . . . , N and x i ∈ X with class labels
parameter C > 0 is used to control the penalty of mis- y i∈Y
classi¯cation. x: Testing sample
From the Lagrangian Eq. (20), we derive a dual T : Total no. of tree
problem, v: Number of input instances used to construct a
( ) tree.
X 1X
wð
Þ ¼ max
i 

y y Kðxi ; xj Þ ; ð20Þ Ensure: Final decision of the classifier.


i
2 i;j i j i j for t ← 1 to T do
S t ← bootstrap samples (S)
subject to 0 
i  C. This equation represents a
C t ← build Tree Classifier (S t, v t)
quadratic optimization issue which is explained using
end
Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO). Generally,
Return a decision for x based on majority voting.
most of
i go to 0 through optimization and some of the
xi , where
i > 0 are known as support vectors.29 For
simplicity of notation, Nx is the total number of vectors
in SVM and
i > 0 for all i. So, the normal way to divide RESULTS
the SVM plane w is deliberated in Eq. (21)
The performance of classi¯er mainly depends on various
X
Nx
controlling parameters like ; ; T which are associated
w¼
i yi x i : ð21Þ
with level set methods. In this experiment, the value of
i¼1
parameter  is set as 0.1,  is set as 5, is set as 2 and
As
ðxi Þ is described implicitly, w will exist only in the maximum iteration is set as 100.19 Several images having
feature space. The classi¯cation of unique query vector q hepatocellular carcinoma and metastasis liver cancer are
can be formulated using Eq. (22) of support vector as processed with level set algorithm. The quality of image
given in Eq. (22): is measured with PSNR, MSE values from the output
!
XNx images using the following equations:
fðqÞ ¼ sign
i yi Kðq; xi Þ þ b ; ð22Þ  2 
i¼1 R
Peak Signal to Noise Ratio ðPSNRÞ ¼ 10 log10 ;
MSE
where b represents the bias of the hyper plane along the
normal vector. ð23Þ

1750047-7
 A. Das, S. S. Panda & S. Sabut

Mean Squre Error ðMSEÞ are rows and column. The classi¯cation parameters di-
P rectly depend on the extracted features, which are dif-
M;N ½I1 ðm; nÞ  I2 ðm; nÞ
2
¼ : ð24Þ ferent instances of segmented liver images. The features
M N
set is classi¯ed with confusion matrix obtained from the
Here, R is the maximum °uctuation in the input image, classi¯er. Four parameters, i.e. true positive (TP), true
I1 and I2 are the input and segmented images, (M; N) negative (TN), false positive (FP), false negative (FN),
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(A) (B) (C) (D)

Fig. 6 (A) original HCC image, (B) segmented liver image, (C) segmented ROI using level set; (D) ¯nal result after morphological operation of
hepatocellular carcinoma.

1750047-8
 Delineation and Classi¯cation of Liver Cancer

are calculated from the following equation: TP

Precision ¼ ;
TN ðTP þ FPÞ
Specificity ¼ ;
ðTN þ FPÞ 2TP
F 1 score ¼ ;
TP ð2TP þ FP þ FNÞ
Recall ¼ ;
ðTP þ FNÞ Mathewes Correlation ðMCCÞ
ðTP þ TNÞ ðTP  TN  FP  FNÞ
Accuracy ¼ ; ¼p :
ðTP þ TN þ FP þ FNÞ ððTP þ FPÞðTP þ FNÞðTN þ FPÞðTN þ FNÞÞ
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by UNIVERSITY OF NEW ENGLAND on 01/02/18. For personal use only.

(A) (B) (C) (D)

Fig. 7 (A) original MCC image, (B) segmented liver image, (C) segmented ROI using level set, (D) segmented image after morphological
operation of metastatic carcinoma.

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 A. Das, S. S. Panda & S. Sabut

Initially, the liver is separated with adaptive threshold-

ing and the cancer region is delineated with the level set.
The segmented output of both adapted thresholding and
level set in cancer images is shown in Figs. 6 and 7, which

Table 1. Classi¯cation Accuracy at 10-fold Cross-Validation.

Classi¯er/
Folder 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
SVM 0.91 0.88 0.93 0.88 0.90 0.88 0.90 0.90 0.88
RF 0.95 0.95 0.95 0.94 0.93 0.94 0.95 0.93 0.94

Table 2. Classi¯cation Results of Classi¯ers.

Classi¯ers Accuracy Speci¯city Precision Recall F-Measures MCC

Biomed. Eng. Appl. Basis Commun. 2017.29. Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com

SVM 0.87 0.90 0.94 0.80 0.87 0.76

RF 0.95 0.95 0.95 0.95 0.95 0.90
by UNIVERSITY OF NEW ENGLAND on 01/02/18. For personal use only.

Table 3. Parameters Evaluation. Fig. 9 Comparison of accuracy of two classi¯er.

Parameters FCM Level-Set

PSNR 12.61 13.81 shows the delineated cancer region clearly. The process
MSE 3056.3 3566.1 of classi¯cation consists of 38 texture features extracted
from the cancer region. These features are tested with
SVM and RF in 10-fold cross-validation process. Under
this validation process, the total dataset (40  38) has
been divided into 10 partitions and each partition
includes 36 training data and 4 test data. Table 1 shows
the obtained evaluated result of classi¯ers at each fold
and Table 2 represents the overall parameters of classi-
¯er result. The quality of the segmented output is
measured with PSNR and MSE values that shows the
RF works better than SVM method., the corresponding
PSNR and MSE values are presented in Table 3.
Figure 8 shows the comparative value of all measured
parameters and Fig. 9 shows the performance of
accuracy at 10-fold cross-set between the classi¯ers
with accuracy of 87% in SVM and 95% in RF classi¯er.
The comparative results with reported literature are
Fig. 8 Comparison of di®erent measures for SVM and RF classi¯ers. presented in Table 4. From the discussed results,

Table 4. Comparison Table with Some Existing Techniques.

Author/Year Modality/Classes Features/Classi¯er Performance Accuracy (%)

Proposed CT/Hepatocellular carcinoma, metastatic LBP-HF/SVM, RF SVM-87
carcinoma RF-95
Sethi et al. (2016)12 CT/Tumor, cyst calculi, normal liver GLCM, DWT, DCT/GA, SV, ANN 95.1
Chang et al. (2017)17 CT/Benign, malignant GLCM. shape, kinetic curve based/Binary 81.82
logistic regression analysis
Alahmer et al. (2016)32 CT/Benign, malignant Intensity, texture, shape features/SVM 89
Mala et al. (2015)33 CT/Fatty, cirrhosis liver Wavelet based statistical feature/PNN, PNN-95
BPN BPN-80
Selavati et al. (2014)34 MRI/Liver cancer, benign type liver Histogram based feature extraction/SVM 86.67
tumor (BLT)
Mittal et al. (2011)35 US/Cyst, hemangioma, hepatocellular FOS, GLRLM, TEM, GWT/BPN 86.4
carcinoma

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we concluded that the RF classi¯er is better in classi-
fying HCC and MCC.
DISCUSSION
The computer-aided diagnosis system is helpful to the
clinician in the diagnosis process. The proposed meth-
odology utilizes CT images of patients having hepato-
cellular carcinoma and metastatic carcinoma and
segmented with the level set method. This automatic
lesion segmentation approach achieved better classi¯-
cation accuracy in RF classi¯er with LBP-HF texture
descriptor compared to the SVM classi¯er. In 2011,
Mittal et al.34 proposed a method that classi¯ed the
Biomed. Eng. Appl. Basis Commun. 2017.29. Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com
liver disease like cyst, metastases, hemangioma, and
by UNIVERSITY OF NEW ENGLAND on 01/02/18. For personal use only.
hepatocellular carcinoma with accuracy of 86.4%, but
our method classi¯ed hepatocellular carcinoma and
metastasis carcinoma with an accuracy of 95% in RF
and 88% in SVM. This result shows the e®ectiveness in
detection and classi¯cation of liver cancer tissues.
CONCLUSION
Image segmentation to detect liver cancer from liver CT
scan images is a crucial task as the abdominal image
consists of liver and other organs. The clustering-based
methods were widely used for medical image segmenta-
tion. In this paper, we used adaptive thresholding to
separate the liver portion and then the level set method
is used to obtain the cancer part of liver. The LBP-
Fourier feature is extracted from all the 40 images and
classi¯ed SVM and RF classi¯ers are used for the he-
patocellular carcinoma and metastatic carcinoma. The
obtained result con¯rms that the proposed method is an
e®ective option in the classi¯cation of cancer cell that
may be useful in the diagnosis process. In future, we may
implement the idea of feature selection techniques to
improve the classi¯cation accuracy in more numbers of
images having cancer.
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