An approach for classification of malignant and benign microcalcification clusters

The only reliable and successful treatment of breast cancer is its detection through mammography at initial stage. Clusters of microcalcifications are important signs of breast cancer. Manual interpretation of mammographic images, in which the suspicious regions are indicated as areas of varying intensities, is not error free due to a number of reasons. These errors can be reduced by using computer-aided diagnosis systems that result in reduction of either false positives or true negatives. The purpose of the study in this paper is to develop a methodology for distinguishing malignant microcalcification clusters from benign microcalcification clusters. The proposed approach first enhances the region of interest by using morphological operations. Then, two types of features, cluster shape features and cluster texture features, are extracted. A Support Vector Machine is used for classification. A new set of shape features based on the recursive subsampling method is added to the feature set, which improves the classification accuracy of the system. It has been found that these features are capable of differentiating malignant and benign tissue regions. To investigate the performance of the proposed approach, mammogram images are taken from Digital Database for Screening Mammography database and an accuracy of 94.25% has been achieved. The experiments have shown that the proposed classification system minimizes the classification errors and is more efficient in correct diagnosis.