Computer aided detection system for micro calcifications in digital mammograms

•Noise and background removed using histogram equalization and morphological filtering.•Local thresholding and Otsu's technique were used to segment masses from the background.•Feature extraction of mammograms images was proposed using Gray Level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM).•Three classifications techniques of mammogram images were applied.

Breast cancer continues to be a significant public health problem in the world. Early detection is the key for improving breast cancer prognosis. Mammogram breast X-ray is considered the most reliable method in early detection of breast cancer. However, it is difficult for radiologists to provide both accurate and uniform evaluation for the enormous mammograms generated in widespread screening. Micro calcification clusters (MCCs) and masses are the two most important signs for the breast cancer, and their automated detection is very valuable for early breast cancer diagnosis. The main objective is to discuss the computer-aided detection system that has been proposed to assist the radiologists in detecting the specific abnormalities and improving the diagnostic accuracy in making the diagnostic decisions by applying techniques splits into three-steps procedure beginning with enhancement by using Histogram equalization (HE) and Morphological Enhancement, followed by segmentation based on Otsu's threshold the region of interest for the identification of micro calcifications and mass lesions, and at last classification stage, which classify between normal and micro calcifications ‘patterns and then classify between benign and malignant micro calcifications. In classification stage; three methods were used, the voting K-Nearest Neighbor classifier (K-NN) with prediction accuracy of 73%, Support Vector Machine classifier (SVM) with prediction accuracy of 83%, and Artificial Neural Network classifier (ANN) with prediction accuracy of 77%.