Ultrasonic liver characterization using phase congruency

Feature extraction plays an important role in the whole process of liver characterization. Because the ultrasonic scanner in use can be adjusted by different clinicians to produce optimal images, the ultrasound images captured sometimes can be greatly influenced by machine settings and further impact the classification result. In this paper, some experiments are made to try to extract the liver features using the 2D phase congruency, which invariant to changes in intensity or contrast, to try to avoid those problems. The effectiveness of our method tested on three classes of liver images shows the potential for physicians to quantify liver status in clinical diagnosis.