Deep learning based liver cancer detection using watershed transform and Gaussian mixture model techniques

Abstract Objectives Liver cancer is one of the leading cause of death in all over the world. Detecting the cancer tissue manually is a difficult task and time consuming. Hence, a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) is used in decision making process for accurate detection for appropriate therapy. Therefore the main objective of this work is to detect the liver cancer accurately using automated method. Methods In this work, we have proposed a new system called as watershed Gaussian based deep learning (WGDL) technique for effective delineate the cancer lesion in computed tomography (CT) images of the liver. A total of 225 images were used in this work to develop the proposed model. Initially, the liver was separated using marker controlled watershed segmentation process and finally the cancer affected lesion was segmented using the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) algorithm. After tumor segmentation, various texture features were extracted from the segmented region. These segmented features were fed to deep neural network (DNN) classifier for automated classification of three types of liver cancer i.e. hemangioma (HEM), hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and metastatic carcinoma (MET). Results We have achieved a classification accuracy of 99.38%, Jaccard index of 98.18%, at 200 epochs using DNN classifier with a negligible validation loss of 0.062 during the classification process. Conclusions Our developed system is ready to be tested with huge database and can aid the radiologist in detecting the liver cancer using CT images.