Automatic Characterization of Benign and Malignant Masses in Mammography

Abstract

The paper aims to develop an automated breast mass characterization system for assisting the radiologist to analyze the digital mammograms. Mammographic Image Analysis Society (MIAS) database images are used in this study. Fuzzy C-means technique is used to segment the mass region from the input image. GLCM texture features namely contrast, correlation, energy and homogeneity are obtained from the region of interest. The texture features extracted from gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) are computed at distance d=1 and θ=0^o, 45^o, 90^o, 135^o. These with three classifiers namely adaboost, back propagation neural network and sparse representation classifiers are used for characterizing the region containing either benign mass or malignant mass. The experimental results show the SRC classifier is more effective with an accuracy of 93.75% and with the Mathew's correlation coefficient (MCC) of 87.35%.