Classification of benign and malignant solid breast lesions on the ultrasound images based on the textural features: the importance of the perifocal lesion area

The amount of ultrasound (US) breast exams continues to grow because of the wider endorsement of breast cancer screening programs. When a solid lesion is found during the US the primary task is to decide if it requires a biopsy. Therefore, our goal was to develop a noninvasive US grayscale image analysis for benign and malignant solid breast lesion differentiation. We used a dataset consisting of 105 ultrasound images with 50 benign and 55 malignant noncystic lesions. Features were extracted from the source image, the image of the gradient module after applying the Sobel filter, and the image after the Laplace filter. Subsequently, eight gray-level cooccurrence matrices (GLCM) were constructed for each lesion, and 13 Haralick textural features were calculated for each GLCM. Additionally, we computed the differences in feature values at different spatial shifts and the differences in feature values between the inner and outer areas of the lesion. The LASSO method was employed to determine the most significant features for classification. Finally, the lesion classification was carried out by various methods. The use of LASSO regression for feature selection enabled us to identify the most significant features for classification. Out of the 13 features selected by the LASSO method, four described the perilesional tissue, two represented the inner area of the lesion and five described the image of the gradient module. The final model achieved a sensitivity of 98%, specificity of 96%, and accuracy of 97%. Considering the perilesional area, Haralick feature differences, and the image of the gradient module can provide crucial parameters for accurate classification of US images. Features with a low AUC index (less than 0.6 in our case) can also be important for improving the quality of classification.