Semantic Segmentation of Breast Ultrasound Image with Pyramid Fuzzy Uncertainty Reduction and Direction Connectedness Feature

Deep learning approaches have achieved impressive results in breast ultrasound (BUS) image segmentation. However, these methods did not solve uncertainty and noise in BUS images well. Meanwhile, they did not involve the context information of BUS images, either. To address this issue, we present a novel deep learning structure for BUS image semantic segmentation by analyzing the uncertainty using a pyramid fuzzy block and generating a novel feature based on connectedness. There are three major contributions in this paper: (1) the structure of pyramid fuzzy block; (2) a novel membership function based on multi-convolution layers; and (3) a novel context feature based on connectedness. The proposed methods are applied to two datasets: a BUS image benchmark with two categories (background and tumor) and a five-category BUS image dataset with fat layer, mammary layer, muscle layer, background, and tumor. The proposed method achieves the best results on both datasets compared with eight state-of-the-art deep learning-based approaches.