Automated and effective content-based image retrieval for digital mammography.

Nowadays, huge number of mammograms has been generated in hospitals for the diagnosis of breast cancer. Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) can contribute more reliable diagnosis by classifying the query mammograms and retrieving similar mammograms already annotated by diagnostic descriptions and treatment results. Since labels, artifacts, and pectoral muscles present in mammograms can bias the retrieval procedures, automated detection and exclusion of these image noise patterns and/or non-breast regions is an essential pre-processing step. In this study, an efficient and automated CBIR system of mammograms was developed and tested. First, the pre-processing steps including automatic labelling-artifact suppression, automatic pectoral muscle removal, and image enhancement using the adaptive median filter were applied. Next, pre-processed images were segmented using the co-occurrence thresholds based seeded region growing algorithm. Furthermore, a set of image features including shape, histogram based statistical, Gabor, wavelet, and Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) features, was computed from the segmented region. In order to select the optimal features, a minimum redundancy maximum relevance (mRMR) feature selection method was then applied. Finally, similar images were retrieved using Euclidean distance similarity measure. The comparative experiments conducted with reference to benchmark mammographic images analysis society (MIAS) database confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed work concerning average precision of 72% and 61.30% for normal & abnormal classes of mammograms, respectively.

Effective mammogram classification based on center symmetric-LBP features in wavelet domain using random forests.

Mammogram classification is a crucial and challenging problem, because it helps in early diagnosis of breast cancer and supports radiologists in their decision to analyze similar mammograms out of a database by recognizing the classes of current mammograms. This paper proposes an effective method for classifying mammograms using random forests with wavelet based center-symmetric local binary pattern (WCS-LBP). To classify mammograms, multi-resolution CS-LBP texture characteristics from non-overlapping regions of the mammograms are captured. Further, we examine most relevant features using support vector machine-recursive feature elimination (SVM-RFE). Finally, we feed the selected features to decision trees and construct random forests which are an ensemble of random decision trees. Using wavelet based local CS-LBP features with random forest, we classify the test images into different categories having the maximum posterior probability. The proposed method shows the improved performance as compared with other variant features and state-of-art methods. The obtained performance measures are 97.3% accuracy, 97.3% precision, 97.2% recall, 97.2% F-measure and 94.1% Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC).