A novel featureless approach to mass detection in digital mammograms based on support vector machines

Phys Med Biol. 2004 Mar 21;49(6):961-75. doi: 10.1088/0031-9155/49/6/007.

Abstract

In this work, we present a novel approach to mass detection in digital mammograms. The great variability of the appearance of masses is the main obstacle to building a mass detection method. It is indeed demanding to characterize all the varieties of masses with a reduced set of features. Hence, in our approach we have chosen not to extract any feature, for the detection of the region of interest; in contrast, we exploit all the information available on the image. A multiresolution overcomplete wavelet representation is performed, in order to codify the image with redundancy of information. The vectors of the very-large space obtained are then provided to a first support vector machine (SVM) classifier. The detection task is considered here as a two-class pattern recognition problem: crops are classified as suspect or not, by using this SVM classifier. False candidates are eliminated with a second cascaded SVM. To further reduce the number of false positives, an ensemble of experts is applied: the final suspect regions are achieved by using a voting strategy. The sensitivity of the presented system is nearly 80% with a false-positive rate of 1.1 marks per image, estimated on images coming from the USF DDSM database.

Publication types

  • Comparative Study
  • Evaluation Study
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Validation Study

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Artificial Intelligence*
  • Breast Neoplasms / classification
  • Breast Neoplasms / diagnostic imaging*
  • Cluster Analysis
  • Computing Methodologies
  • Expert Systems
  • False Positive Reactions
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Information Storage and Retrieval / methods*
  • Mammography / methods*
  • Pattern Recognition, Automated*
  • Radiographic Image Enhancement / methods
  • Radiographic Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Sensitivity and Specificity
  • Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted