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Characterization of hepatocellular carcinomas (HCCs) and metastatic carcinomas (METs) from B-mode ultrasound presents a daunting challenge for radiologists due to their highly overlapping appearances. The differential diagnosis between HCCs and METs is often carried out by observing the texture of regions inside the lesion and the texture of background liver on which the lesion has evolved. The present study investigates the contribution made by texture patterns of regions inside and outside of the lesions for binary classification between HCC and MET lesions. The study is performed on 51 real ultrasound liver images with 54 malignant lesions, i.e., 27 images with 27 solitary HCCs (13 small HCCs and 14 large HCCs) and 24 images with 27 MET lesions (12 typical cases and 15 atypical cases). A total of 120 within-lesion regions of interest and 54 surrounding lesion regions of interest are cropped …