Breast mass classification in ultrasound based on Kendall's shape manifold

Abstract

Morphological features play an important role in breast mass classification in sonography. While benign breast masses tend to have a well-defined ellipsoidal contour, shape of malignant breast masses is commonly ill-defined and highly variable. Various handcrafted morphological features have been developed over the years to assess this phenomenon and help the radiologists differentiate benign and malignant masses. In this paper we propose an automatic approach to morphology analysis, we express shapes of breast masses as points on the Kendall's shape manifold. Next, we use the full Procrustes distance to develop support vector machine classifiers for breast mass differentiation. The usefulness of our method is demonstrated using a dataset of B-mode images collected from 163 breast masses. Our method achieved area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.81. The proposed method can be used to assess shapes of breast masses in ultrasound without any feature engineering.