A contrast enhancement method for improving the segmentation of breast lesions on ultrasonography

Abstract Purpose: This paper presents an adaptive contrast enhancement method based on sigmoidal mapping function (SACE) used for improving the computerized segmentation of breast lesions on ultrasound. Methods: First, from the original ultrasound image an intensity variation map is obtained, which is used to generate local sigmoidal mapping functions related to distinct contextual regions. Then, a bilinear interpolation scheme is used to transform every original pixel to a new gray level value. Also, four contrast enhancement techniques widely used in breast ultrasound enhancement are implemented: histogram equalization (HEQ), contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE), fuzzy enhancement (FEN), and sigmoid based enhancement (SEN). In addition, such five contrast enhancement techniques are considered in a computerized lesion segmentation scheme based on watershed transformation. The performance comparison among techniques is assessed in terms of both the quality of contrast enhancement and the segmentation accuracy. The former is quantified by the C measure, where the greater the C value, the better the contrast enhancement, whereas the latter is calculated by the Jaccard index, which should tend towards unity to indicate adequate segmentation. Results: The experiments consider a data set with 500 breast ultrasound images. The results show that SACE outperforms its counterparts, where the median values for the C measure are: SACE: 139.4, SEN: 68.2, HEQ: 64.1, CLAHE: 62.8, and FEN: 7.9. Considering the segmentation performance results, the SACE method presents the largest accuracy, where the median values for the Jaccard index are: SACE: 0.81, FEN: 0.80, CLAHE: 0.79, HEQ: 77, and SEN: 0.63. Conclusion: The SACE method performs well due to the combination of three elements: (1) the intensity variation map reduces intensity variations that could distort the real response of the mapping function, (2) the sigmoidal mapping function enhances the gray level range where the transition between lesion and background is found, and (3) the adaptive enhancing scheme for coping with local contrasts. Hence, the SACE approach is appropriate for enhancing contrast before computerized lesion segmentation.