A study of hepatic fibrosis staging methods using diffraction enhanced imaging

The early hepatic fibrosis staging is very important for timely diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of all chronic liver diseases. Diffraction-enhanced imaging, which can provide much more information on soft tissue morphology than conventional absorption radiography, might be a potential noninvasive technique to diagnose and stage hepatic fibrosis. This paper presents different feature extraction strategies and classification methods to automatically classify hepatic fibrosis using diffraction-enhanced imaging images. Texture features are obtained using a total of three methods including first order feature, gray level co-occurrence matrix, and grayscale gradient co-occurrence matrix. The fusion of these texture features is also studied. The principal component analysis is used to reduce the dimension of the features and redundant information among data. The features are classified using two popular classification techniques, namely, K-nearest neighbors and support vector machines. On the basis of the comparison of different feature strategies and classification methods, we can identify the suitable methods for grading hepatic fibrosis. The proposed approach efficiently classifies the hepatic fibrosis DEI images into four classes with the highest classification accuracy of 99.99%. We further demonstrate the potential of the DEI images in staging hepatic fibrosis.