Contourlet Transform based Computer-Aided Diagnosis system for liver tumors on computed tomography images

Liver cancer is one of the most popular cancer diseases and causes a large amount of death every year. Computer-aided liver analysis can help in reducing the risk of liver surgery and design treatment strategies. This paper develops a novel Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) system using Contourlet Transform based feature extraction for automatic diagnosis of tumors in the liver. Evaluation of the CAD system with suspected liver tumor indicates that the sensitivity and specificity of the proposed system are 97.1% and 91.4% respectively, compared to the mean sensitivity and specificity of 91.4%and 85.7%, obtained by feature extraction using Wavelet Transforms. The experimental results suggest that the developed CAD system has great potential and promise in automatic diagnosis of both benign and malignant tumors of liver.