Breast cancer detection and classification in digital mammography based on Non-Subsampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT) and Super Resolution

• We propose a new algorithm for breast cancer detection and classification.
• Our system can accurately detect the probability of benign or malign breast lesion.
• We utilize NSCT transform and super resolution to improve the quality of the images.
• The results on MIAS database show significant performance of the proposed method.
• Our system achieves 91.43% and 6.42% as a mean accuracy and FPR, respectively.

Breast cancer is one of the most perilous diseases among women. Breast screening is a method of detecting breast cancer at a very early stage which can reduce the mortality rate. Mammography is a standard method for the early diagnosis of breast cancer. In this paper, a new algorithm is proposed for breast cancer detection and classification in digital mammography based on Non-Subsampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT) and Super Resolution (SR). The presented algorithm includes three main parts including pre-processing, feature extraction and classification. In the pre-processing stage, after determining the region of interest (ROI) by an automatic technique, the quality of image is improved using NSCT and SR algorithm. In the feature extraction part, several features of the image components are extracted and skewness of each feature is calculated. Finally, AdaBoost algorithm is used to classify and determine the probability of benign and malign disease. The obtained results on Mammographic Image Analysis Society (MIAS) database indicate the significant performance and superiority of the proposed method in comparison with the state of the art approaches. According to the obtained results, the proposed technique achieves 91.43% and 6.42% as a mean accuracy and FPR, respectively.