Title:Differential Diagnosis of Atypical Hepatocellular Carcinoma in Contrast-Enhanced Ultrasound Using Spatio-Temporal Diagnostic Semantics
Abstract:
Atypical HepatoCellular Carcinoma (HCC) is very hard to distinguish from Focal Nodular Hyperplasia (FNH) in routine imaging. However little attention was paid to this problem. This paper proposes a novel liver tumor Computer-Aided Diagnostic (CAD) approach extracting spatio-temporal semantics for atypical HCC. With respect to useful diagnostic semantics, our model automatically calculates three types of semantic feature with equally down-sampled frames based on Contrast-Enhanced UltraSound (CEUS). Thereafter, a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier is trained to make the final diagnosis. Compared with traditional methods for diagnosing HCC, the proposed model has the advantage of less computational complexity and being able to handle the atypical HCC cases. The experimental results show that our method obtained a pretty considerable performance and outperformed two traditional methods. According to the results, the average accuracy reaches 94.40%, recall rate 94.76%, F1-score value 94.62%, specificity 93.62% and sensitivity 94.76%, indicating good merit for automatically diagnosing atypical HCC cases.
Our contribute:
◆ The first computer-aided diagnosis algorithm focusing on atypical liver cancer
◆ The spatio-temporal feature extraction algorithm based on diagnostic semantics was used for video frame analysis of contrast-enhanced Ultrasound (CEUS)
Dataset and code:Download

Fig20.Examples of FNH (upper) and atypical HCC (lower): (a) tumor region in arterial phase (arrows); (b) models of spoke-wheel arteries in the center (upper) or chaotic distribution (lower) corresponding to (a); (c) FNH and atypical HCC show sustained enhancement in late phase (arrows); (d) models of homogeneous distribution of enhancement (upper) and heterogeneous distribution of enhancement (lower)
Fig21.The flow chart of the proposed feature