Computer-aided detection and diagnosis of mammographic masses using multi-resolution analysis of oriented tissue patterns

In this article, a novel approach is proposed for automatic detection and diagnosis of mammographic masses, one of the common signs of non-palpable breast cancer. However, detection and diagnosis of mass are difficult due to its irregular shape, variability in size, and occlusion within breast tissue. The main aim of this study is to classify masses into benign and malignant after detecting them automatically. We propose an iterative method of high-to-low intensity thresholding controlled by radial region growing for the detection of masses. Based on the observation that in presence of mass orientation of tissue patterns changes, which may differ from benign to malignant, a multi resolution analysis of orientation of tissue patterns is then performed to categorize them. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated with images from the digital database for screening mammography (DDSM), containing 450 benign masses, 440 malignant masses, and 410 normal images. A sensitivity of 85.0% is achieved at 1.4 false positives per image in mass detection, whereas an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.92 with an accuracy of 83.30% is achieved for the diagnosis of malignant masses.