An Efficient Method for Automated Breast Mass Segmentation and Classification in Digital Mammograms

Abstract

Background: Automatic detection and classification of breast masses in mammograms are still challenging tasks. Today, computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems are being developed to assist radiologists in interpreting mammograms. Objectives: This study aimed to provide a novel method for automatic segmentation and classification of masses in mammograms to help radiologists make an accurate diagnosis. Materials and Methods: For an efficient mass diagnosis in mammograms, we proposed an automatic scheme to perform both mass detection and classification. First, a combination of several image enhancement algorithms, including contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE), guided imaging, and median filtering, was investigated to enhance the visual features of breast area and increase the accuracy of segmentation outcomes. Second, the density of discrete wavelet coefficient density (DDWCs), based on the quincunx lifting scheme (QLS), was proposed to find suspicious mass regions or regions of interest (ROIs). Finally, mass lesions that appeared in the mammogram were classified into four categories of benign, probably benign, malignant, and probably malignant, based on the morphological shape. The proposed method was evaluated among 1593 images from the Curated Breast Imaging Subset-Digital Database for Screening Mammography (CBIS-DDSM) dataset. Results: The experimental results revealed that the suspected region localization had 100% sensitivity, with a mean of 6.4 ± 4.5 false positive (FP) detections per image. Moreover, the results showed an overall accuracy of 85.9% and an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.901 for the mass classification algorithm. Conclusion: The present results showed the comparable performance of our proposed method to that of the state-of-the-art methods. Keywords Mass Classification Image Processing and Analysis Computer-aided Diagnosis Breast Mass