Interpretable machine learning for characterization of focal liver lesions by contrast-enhanced ultrasound. IEEE transactions on ultrasonics, ferroelectrics, and frequency control Turco, S., Tiyarattanachai, T., Ebrahimkheil, K., Eisenbrey, J., Kamaya, A., Mischi, M., Lyshchik, A., El Kaffas, A. 2022; PP

Abstract

This work proposes an interpretable radiomics approach to differentiate between malignant and benign focal liver lesions (FLLs) on contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS). Although CEUS has shown promise for differential FLLs diagnosis, current clinical assessment is performed only by qualitative analysis of the contrast enhancement patterns. Quantitative analysis is often hampered by the unavoidable presence of motion artefacts and by the complex, spatiotemporal nature of liver contrast enhancement, consisting of multiple, overlapping vascular phases. To fully exploit the wealth of information in CEUS, while coping with these challenges, here we propose to combine features extracted by temporal and spatiotemporal analysis in the arterial phase enhancement with spatial features extracted by texture analysis at different time points. Using the extracted features as input, several machine learning classifier are optimized to achieve semi-automatic FLLs characterization, for which there is no need for motion compensation and the only manual input required is the location of a suspicious lesion. Clinical validation on 87 FLLs from 72 patients at risk for HCC showed promising performance, achieving a balanced accuracy of 0.84 in the distinction between benign and malignant lesions. Analysis of feature relevance demonstrates that a combination of spatiotemporal and texture features is needed to achieve the best performance. Interpretation of the most relevant features suggests that aspects related to microvascular perfusion and the microvascular architecture, together with the spatial enhancement characteristics at wash-in and peak enhancement, are important to aid the accurate characterization of FLLs.

View details for DOI 10.1109/TUFFC.2022.3161719

View details for PubMedID 35320099