COMPUTER AIDED SYSTEM FOR BREAST CANCER DIAGNOSIS USING CURVELET TRANSFORM

Breast cancer is a leading cause of death among women worldwide. Early detection is the key for improving breast cancer prognosis. Digital mammography remains one of the most suitable tools for early detection of breast cancer. Hence, there are strong needs for the development of computer aided diagnosis (CAD) systems which have the capability to help radiologists in decision making. The main goal is to increase the diagnostic accuracy rate. In this thesis we developed a computer aided system for the diagnosis and detection of breast cancer using curvelet transform. Curvelet is a multiscale transform which possess directionality and anisotropy, and it breaks some inherent limitations of wavelet in representing edges in images. We started this study by developing a diagnosis system. Five feature extraction methods were developed with curvelet and wavelet coefficients to differentiate between different breast cancer classes. The results with curvelet and wavelet were compared. The experimental results show a high performance of the proposed methods and classification accuracy rate achieved 97.30%. The thesis then provides an automatic system for breast cancer detection. An automatic thresholding algorithm was used to separate the area composed of the breast and the pectoral muscle from the background of the image. Subsequently, a region growing algorithm was used to locate the pectoral muscle and suppress it from the breast. Then, the work concentrates on the segmentation of region of interest (ROI). Two methods are suggested to accomplish the segmentation stage: an adaptive thresholding method and a pattern matching method. Once the ROI has been identified, an automatic cropping is performed to extract it from the original mammogram. Subsequently, the suggested feature extraction methods were applied to the segmented ROIs. Finally, the K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers were used to determine whether the region is abnormal or normal. At this level, the study focuses on two abnormality types (mammographic masses and architectural distortion). Experimental results show that the introduced methods have very high detection accuracies. The effectiveness of the proposed methods has been tested with Mammographic Image Analysis Society (MIAS) dataset. Throughout the thesis all proposed methods and algorithms have been applied with both curvelet and wavelet for comparison and statistical tests were also performed. The overall results show that curvelet transform performs better than wavelet and the difference is statistically significant

An Unsupervised Method for Suspicious Regions Detection in Mammogram Images

Over the past years many researchers proposed biomedical imaging methods for computer-aided detection and classification of suspicious regions in mammograms. Mammogram interpretation is performed by radiologists by visual inspection. The large volume of mammograms to be analyzed makes such readings labour intensive and often inaccurate. For this purpose, in this paper we propose a new unsupervised method to automatically detect suspicious regions in mammogram images. The method consists mainly of two steps: preprocessing; feature extraction and selection. Preprocessing steps allow to separate background region from the breast profile region. In greater detail, gray levels mapping transform and histogram specifications are used to enhance the visual representation of mammogram details. Then, local keypoints and descriptors such as SURF have been extracted in breast profile region. The extracted keypoints are filtered by proper parameters tuning to detect suspicious regions. The results, in terms of sensitivity and confidence interval are very encouraging

COMPUTER AIDED SYSTEM FOR BREAST CANCER DIAGNOSIS USING CURVELET TRANSFORM

Breast cancer is a leading cause of death among women worldwide. Early detection is the key for improving breast cancer prognosis. Digital mammography remains one of the most suitable tools for early detection of breast cancer. Hence, there are strong needs for the development of computer aided diagnosis (CAD) systems which have the capability to help radiologists in decision making. The main goal is to increase the diagnostic accuracy rate. In this thesis we developed a computer aided system for the diagnosis and detection of breast cancer using curvelet transform. Curvelet is a multiscale transform which possess directionality and anisotropy, and it breaks some inherent limitations of wavelet in representing edges in images. We started this study by developing a diagnosis system. Five feature extraction methods were developed with curvelet and wavelet coefficients to differentiate between different breast cancer classes. The results with curvelet and wavelet were compared. The experimental results show a high performance of the proposed methods and classification accuracy rate achieved 97.30%. The thesis then provides an automatic system for breast cancer detection. An automatic thresholding algorithm was used to separate the area composed of the breast and the pectoral muscle from the background of the image. Subsequently, a region growing algorithm was used to locate the pectoral muscle and suppress it from the breast. Then, the work concentrates on the segmentation of region of interest (ROI). Two methods are suggested to accomplish the segmentation stage: an adaptive thresholding method and a pattern matching method. Once the ROI has been identified, an automatic cropping is performed to extract it from the original mammogram. Subsequently, the suggested feature extraction methods were applied to the segmented ROIs. Finally, the K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers were used to determine whether the region is abnormal or normal. At this level, the study focuses on two abnormality types (mammographic masses and architectural distortion). Experimental results show that the introduced methods have very high detection accuracies. The effectiveness of the proposed methods has been tested with Mammographic Image Analysis Society (MIAS) dataset. Throughout the thesis all proposed methods and algorithms have been applied with both curvelet and wavelet for comparison and statistical tests were also performed. The overall results show that curvelet transform performs better than wavelet and the difference is statistically significant

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

IMCAD: Computer Aided System for Breast Masses Detection based on Immune Recognition

Computer Aided Detection (CAD) systems are very important tools which help radiologists as a second reader in detecting early breast cancer in an efficient way, specially on screening mammograms. One of the challenging problems is the detection of masses, which are powerful signs of cancer, because of their poor apperance on mammograms. This paper investigates an automatic CAD for detection of breast masses in screening mammograms based on fuzzy segmentation and a bio-inspired method for pattern recognition: Artificial Immune Recognition System. The proposed approach is applied to real clinical images from the full field digital mammographic database: Inbreast. In order to validate our proposition, we propose the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve as an analyzer of our IMCAD classifier system, which achieves a good area under curve, with a sensitivity of 100% and a specificity of 95%. The recognition system based on artificial immunity has shown its efficiency on recognizing masses from a very restricted set of training regions

Detection of breast pathologies in digital mammography images by thresholding and mathematical morphology

This paper proposes an algorithm for mass and micro-calcification detection by manual thresholding and prewitt detector. This algorithm has been tested using mammography images of different densities from multiple databases of a health clinic and images taken from the internet (40 images in total). The results are very accurate, allowing better detection of breast pathologies (mass and micro-calcification). Finally, the detection of breast pathologies was performed using as input a detection algorithm specially designed for this purpose. After segmentation by manual thresholding, morphological opening, morphological dilatation and Prewitt contour detection we have a demarcation of the masses and breast micro-calcification. The results obtained show the robustness of the proposed manual thresholding method. In order to evaluate the efficiency of our pathology detector, we compared our results with those in the literature and performed a qualitative evaluation with a rate of 98.04% for the detection of breast pathologies.  A radiologist from the health clinic evaluated the results and considers them acceptable to the CAD

Computer aided diagnosis in radiology

Ankara : The Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering and Institute of Engineering and Sciences, Bilkent Univ., 1999.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- Bilkent University, 1999.Includes bibliographical references leaves 117-124.Breast cancer is one of the most deadly diseases for middle-aged women. In this thesis, computer-aided diagnosis tools are developed for the detection of breast cancer on mammograms. These tools include a detection scheme for microcalcification clusters which are an early sign of breast cancer, and a method to detect the boundaries of mass lesions. In the first microcalcification detection method we propose, a subband decomposition structure is employed. Contrary to the previous work, the detection is carried out in the subband domain. The mammogram image is first processed by a subband decomposition filter bank. The resulting subimage is analyzed to detect microcalcification clusters. In regions corresponding to the healthy breast tissue the distribution is almost Gaussian. Since microcalcifications are small, isolated bright spots, they produce outliers in the subimages and the distribution of pixels deviates from Gaussian. The subimages are divided into overlapping square regions. In each square region, skewness and kurtosis values are estimated. As third and fourth order correlation parameters, skewness and kurtosis, are measures of the asymmetry and impulsiveness of the distribution, they can be used to find the locations of microcalcification clusters. If the values of these parameters are higher than experimentally determined thresholds then the region is marked as a potential cancer area. Experimental studies indicate that this method successfully detects regions containing microcalcifications. We also propose another microcalcification detection method which uses two- dimensional (2-D) adaptive filtering and a higher order statistics based Gaussianity test. In this method, statistics of the prediction errors are computed to determine whether the samples are from a Gaussian distribution. The prediction error sequence deviates from Gaussianity around microcalcification locations because prediction of microcalcification pixels is more difficult than prediction of the pixels corresponding to healthy breast tissue. Then, we develop a new Gaussianity test which has higher sensitivity to outliers. The scheme which uses this test gives better detection performance compared to the previously proposed methods. Within the detected regions it is possible to segment individual microcalcifications. An outlier labeling and nonlinear subband decomposition based microcalcification segmentation method is also investigated. Two types of lesions, namely mass and stellate lesions, might be indicators of breast cancer. Finally, we propose a snake algorithm based scheme to detect the boundaries of mass lesions on mammograms. This scheme is compared with a recently developed region growing based boundary detection method. It is observed that the snake algorithm results in a more smooth boundary which is consistent with the morphological structure of mass lesions.Gürcan, Metin NafiPh.D