Microcalcifications Detection Using Image And Signal Processing Techniques For Early Detection Of Breast Cancer

Breast cancer has transformed into a severe health problem around the world. Early diagnosis is an important factor to survive this disease. The earliest detection signs of potential breast cancer that is distinguishable by current screening techniques are the presence of microcalcifications (MCs). MCs are small crystals of calcium apatite and their normal size ranges from 0.1mm to 0.5mm single crystals to groups up to a few centimeters in diameter. They are the first indication of breast cancer in more than 40% of all breast cancer cases, making their diagnosis critical. This dissertation proposes several segmentation techniques for detecting and isolating point microcalcifications: Otsu’s Method, Balanced Histogram Thresholding, Iterative Method, Maximum Entropy, Moment Preserving, and Genetic Algorithm. These methods were applied to medical images to detect microcalcifications. In this dissertation, results from the application of these techniques are presented and their efficiency for early detection of breast cancer is explained. This dissertation also explains theories and algorithms related to these techniques that can be used for breast cancer detection

Fuzzy technique for microcalcifications clustering in digital mammograms

Background Mammography has established itself as the most efficient technique for the identification of the pathological breast lesions. Among the various types of lesions, microcalcifications are the most difficult to identify since they are quite small (0.1-1.0 mm) and often poorly contrasted against an images background. Within this context, the Computer Aided Detection (CAD) systems could turn out to be very useful in breast cancer control. Methods In this paper we present a potentially powerful microcalcifications cluster enhancement method applicable to digital mammograms. The segmentation phase employs a form filter, obtained from LoG filter, to overcome the dependence from target dimensions and to optimize the recognition efficiency. A clustering method, based on a Fuzzy C-means (FCM), has been developed. The described method, Fuzzy C-means with Features (FCM-WF), was tested on simulated clusters of microcalcifications, implying that the location of the cluster within the breast and the exact number of microcalcifications are known.The proposed method has been also tested on a set of images from the mini-Mammographic database provided by Mammographic Image Analysis Society (MIAS) publicly available. Results The comparison between FCM-WF and standard FCM algorithms, applied on both databases, shows that the former produces better microcalcifications associations for clustering than the latter: with respect to the private and the public database we had a performance improvement of 10% and 5% with regard to the Merit Figure and a 22% and a 10% of reduction of false positives potentially identified in the images, both to the benefit of the FCM-WF. The method was also evaluated in terms of Sensitivity (93% and 82%), Accuracy (95% and 94%), FP/image (4% for both database) and Precision (62% and 65%). Conclusions Thanks to the private database and to the informations contained in it regarding every single microcalcification, we tested the developed clustering method with great accuracy. In particular we verified that 70% of the injected clusters of the private database remained unaffected if the reconstruction is performed with the FCM-WF. Testing the method on the MIAS databases allowed also to verify the segmentation properties of the algorithm, showing that 80% of pathological clusters remained unaffected

Improvement for detection of microcalcifications through clustering algorithms and artificial neural networks

A new method for detecting microcalcifications in regions of interest (ROIs) extracted from digitized mammograms is proposed. The top-hat transform is a technique based on mathematical morphology operations and, in this paper, is used to perform contrast enhancement of the mi-crocalcifications. To improve microcalcification detection, a novel image sub-segmentation approach based on the possibilistic fuzzy c-means algorithm is used. From the original ROIs, window-based features, such as the mean and standard deviation, were extracted; these features were used as an input vector in a classifier. The classifier is based on an artificial neural network to identify patterns belonging to microcalcifications and healthy tissue. Our results show that the proposed method is a good alternative for automatically detecting microcalcifications, because this stage is an important part of early breast cancer detectio

Digital mammography, cancer screening: Factors important for image compression

The use of digital mammography for breast cancer screening poses several novel problems such as development of digital sensors, computer assisted diagnosis (CAD) methods for image noise suppression, enhancement, and pattern recognition, compression algorithms for image storage, transmission, and remote diagnosis. X-ray digital mammography using novel direct digital detection schemes or film digitizers results in large data sets and, therefore, image compression methods will play a significant role in the image processing and analysis by CAD techniques. In view of the extensive compression required, the relative merit of 'virtually lossless' versus lossy methods should be determined. A brief overview is presented here of the developments of digital sensors, CAD, and compression methods currently proposed and tested for mammography. The objective of the NCI/NASA Working Group on Digital Mammography is to stimulate the interest of the image processing and compression scientific community for this medical application and identify possible dual use technologies within the NASA centers

Modelling mammographic microcalcification clusters using persistent mereotopology

AbstractIn mammographic imaging, the presence of microcalcifications, small deposits of calcium in the breast, is a primary indicator of breast cancer. However, not all microcalcifications are malignant and their distribution within the breast can be used to indicate whether clusters of microcalcifications are benign or malignant. Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems can be employed to help classify such microcalcification clusters. In this paper a novel method for classifying microcalcification clusters is presented by representing discrete mereotopological relations between the individual microcalcifications over a range of scales in the form of a mereotopological barcode. This barcode based representation is able to model complex relations between multiple regions and the results on mammographic microcalcification data shows the effectiveness of this approach. Classification accuracies of 95% and 80% are achieved on the MIAS and DDSM datasets, respectively. These results are comparable to existing state-of-the art methods. This work also demonstrates that mereotopological barcodes could be used to help trained clinicians in their diagnosis by providing a clinical interpretation of barcodes that represent both benign and malignant cases

Depth Segmentation Method for Cancer Detection in Mammography Images

Breast cancer detection remains a subject matter of intense and also a stream that will create a path for numerous debates. Mammography has long been the mainstay of breast cancer detection and is the only screening test proven to reduce mortality. Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems have the potential to assist radiologists in the early detection of cancer. Many techniques were introduced based on SVM classifier, spatial and frequency domain, active contour method, k-NN clustering method but these methods have so many disadvantages on the SNR ratio, efficiency etc. The quality of detection of cancer cells is dependent with the segmentation of the mammography image. Here a new method is proposed for segmentation. This algorithm focuses to segment the image depth wise and also coloured based segmentation is implemented. Here the feature identification and detection of malignant and benign cells are done more easily and also to increase the efficiency to detect the early stages of breast cancer through mammography images. In which the relative signal enhancement technique is also done for high dynamic range images. Markovian random function can be used in the depth segmentation. Markov Random Field (MRF) is used in mammography images. It is because this method can model intensity in homogeneities occurring in these images. This will be helpful to find the featured tumor DOI: 10.17762/ijritcc2321-8169.15023

ANN and Adaboost application for automatic detection of microcalcifications in breast cancer

AbstractObjectiveMicrocalcifications or MCs are considered to be the basic symptoms present in mammograms for breast cancer diagnosis. Therefore, the accurate detection of MCs is mandatory for the on-time diagnosis, effective treatment and reduction of mortality rates due to breast cancer. Mammogram analysis and interpretation is a challenging task, and there are many obstructions to the accurate detection of MCs such as small and non-uniform shape and size of the MCs clusters in addition to low contrast quality of MCs as compared to the rest of the tissue. These shortcomings of manual interpretation of MCs raise the need for an automatic detection system to assist radiologists in mammogram analysis. In this study, an automated system has been developed to minimize the manual inference and diagnose breast cancer with good precision. In this paper, we propose a two-fold detection algorithm. In the first stage, all suspicious regions from the mammogram are segmented out. In the next stage, these suspected regions are fed to a classifier which then detects whether the region was normal, benign or malignant. We compared the performance of a Neural Network classifier with Adaboost. ANN classifier shows more sensitivity and specificity but less accuracy as compared to Adaboost for tested images. Overall results show that the developed algorithm is able to achieve high accuracy and efficiency for the detection and diagnosis of breast cancer lesions for images from two different databases used, and also for mammograms obtained from a local hospital.ConclusionThe suggested algorithm was tested for DDSM, MIAS and local database and showed high level of overall accuracy (98.68%) and sensitivity (80.15%)

A New Approach for Clustered MCs Classification with Sparse Features Learning and TWSVM

In digital mammograms, an early sign of breast cancer is the existence of microcalcification clusters (MCs), which is very important to the early breast cancer detection. In this paper, a new approach is proposed to classify and detect MCs. We formulate this classification problem as sparse feature learning based classification on behalf of the test samples with a set of training samples, which are also known as a “vocabulary” of visual parts. A visual information-rich vocabulary of training samples is manually built up from a set of samples, which include MCs parts and no-MCs parts. With the prior ground truth of MCs in mammograms, the sparse feature learning is acquired by the lP-regularized least square approach with the interior-point method. Then we designed the sparse feature learning based MCs classification algorithm using twin support vector machines (TWSVMs). To investigate its performance, the proposed method is applied to DDSM datasets and compared with support vector machines (SVMs) with the same dataset. Experiments have shown that performance of the proposed method is more efficient or better than the state-of-art methods