A Fully Convolutional Network Model for Classifying Liver Fibrosis Stages from Ultrasound B-mode Images

In this paper, we deal with a liver fibrosis classification problem using ultrasound B-mode images. Commonly representative methods for classifying the stages of liver fibrosis include liver biopsy and diagnosis based on ultrasound images. The overall liver shape and the smoothness and roughness of speckle pattern represented in ultrasound images are used for determining the fibrosis stages. Although the ultrasound image based classification is used frequently as an alternative or complementary method of the invasive biopsy, it also has the limitations that liver fibrosis stage decision depends on the image quality and the doctor's experience. With the rapid development of deep learning algorithms, several studies using deep learning methods have been carried out for automated liver fibrosis classification and showed superior performance of high accuracy. The performance of those deep learning methods depends closely on the amount of datasets. We propose an enhanced U-net architecture to maximize the classification accuracy with limited small amount of image datasets. U-net is well known as a neural network for fast and precise segmentation of medical images. We design it newly for the purpose of classifying liver fibrosis stages. In order to assess the performance of the proposed architecture, numerical experiments are conducted on a total of 118 ultrasound B-mode images acquired from 78 patients with liver fibrosis symptoms of F0~F4 stages. The experimental results support that the performance of the proposed architecture is much better compared to the transfer learning using the pre-trained model of VGGNet.

초음파 B-모드 영상에서 FCN(fully convolutional network) 모델을 이용한 간 섬유화 단계 분류 알고리즘