Benign and malignant breast tumors classification based on region growing and CNN segmentation

Breast cancer is regarded as one of the most frequent mortality causes among women. As early detection of breast cancer increases the survival chance, creation of a system to diagnose suspicious masses in mammograms is important. In this paper, two automated methods are presented to diagnose mass types of benign and malignant in mammograms. In the first proposed method, segmentation is done using an automated region growing whose threshold is obtained by a trained artificial neural network (ANN). In the second proposed method, segmentation is performed by a cellular neural network (CNN) whose parameters are determined by a genetic algorithm (GA). Intensity, textural, and shape features are extracted from segmented tumors. GA is used to select appropriate features from the set of extracted features. In the next stage, ANNs are used to classify the mammograms as benign or malignant. To evaluate the performance of the proposed methods different classifiers (such as random forest, naïve Bayes, SVM, and KNN) are used. Results of the proposed techniques performed on MIAS and DDSM databases are promising. The obtained sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy rates are 96.87%, 95.94%, and 96.47%, respectively.