A hybrid fuzzy-neural system for computer-aided diagnosis of ultrasound kidney images using prominent features.

The objective of this work is to develop and implement a computer-aided decision support system for an automated diagnosis and classification of ultrasound kidney images. The proposed method distinguishes three kidney categories namely normal, medical renal diseases and cortical cyst. For the each pre-processed ultrasound kidney image, 36 features are extracted. Two types of decision support systems, optimized multi-layer back propagation network and hybrid fuzzy-neural system have been developed with these features for classifying the kidney categories. The performance of the hybrid fuzzy-neural system is compared with the optimized multi-layer back propagation network in terms of classification efficiency, training and testing time. The results obtained show that fuzzy-neural system provides higher classification efficiency with minimum training and testing time. It has also been found that instead of using all 36 features, ranking the features enhance classification efficiency. The outputs of the decision support systems are validated with medical expert to measure the actual efficiency. The overall discriminating capability of the systems is accessed with performance evaluation measure, f-score. It has been observed that the performance of fuzzy-neural system is superior compared to optimized multi-layer back propagation network. Such hybrid fuzzy-neural system with feature extraction algorithms and pre-processing scheme helps in developing computer-aided diagnosis system for ultrasound kidney images and can be used as a secondary observer in clinical decision making.