Classification of benign and malignant breast tumors based on hybrid level set segmentation

• Improved GA and CNN provided level set with more efficient initial boundaries compared to SFC.
• Level set parameters were tuned using a dynamic training procedure adaptively and automatically.
• MLP produces the highest classification accuracy among other classifiers.
• Adaptive segmentation methods achieved higher performance than that of the first proposed methods.

Computer-aided Diagnosis (CADx) technology can substantially aid in early detection and diagnosis of breast cancers. However, the overall performance of a CADx system is tied, to a large extent, to the accuracy with which the tumors can be segmented in a mammogram. This implies that the segmentation of mammograms is a critical step in the diagnosis of benign and malignant tumors. In this paper, we develop an enhanced mammography CADx system with an emphasis on the segmentation step. In particular, we present two hybrid algorithms based upon region-based, contour-based and clustering segmentation techniques to recognize benign and malignant breast tumors. In the first algorithm, in order to obtain the most accurate final segmented tumor, the initial segmented image, that is required for the level set, is provided by one of spatial fuzzy clustering (SFC), improved region growing (RG), or cellular neural network (CNN). In the second algorithm, all of the parameters which control the level set are obtained from a dynamic training procedure by the combination of both genetic algorithms (GA) and artificial neural network (ANN) or memetic algorithm (MA) and ANN. After segmenting tumors using one of the hybrid proposed methods, intensity, shape and texture features are extracted from tumors, and the appropriate features are then selected by another GA algorithm. Finally, to classify tumors as benign or malignant, different classifiers such as ANN, random forest, naïve Bayes, support vector machine (SVM), and K-nearest neighbor (KNN) are used. Experimental results confirm the efficiency of the proposed methods in terms of sensitivity, specificity, accuracy and area under ROC curve (AUC) for the classification of breast tumors. It was concluded that RG and GA in adaptive RG-LS method produce more accurate primary boundary of tumors and appropriate parameters for the level set technique in segmentation and subsequently in classification.