Analysis of nuclei textures of fine needle aspirated cytology images for breast cancer diagnosis using Complex Daubechies wavelets

Breast cancer is the most frequent cause of cancer induced death among women in the world. Diagnosis of this cancer can be done through radiological, surgical, and pathological assessments of breast tissue samples. A common test for detection of this cancer involves visual microscopic inspection of Fine Needle Aspiration Cytology (FNAC) samples of breast tissue. The result of analysis on this sample by a cyto-pathologist is crucial for the breast cancer patient. For the assessment of malignancy, the chromatin texture patterns of the cell nuclei are essential. Wavelet transforms have been shown to be good tools for extracting information about texture. In this paper, it has been investigated whether complex wavelets can provide better performance than the more common real valued wavelet transform. The features extracted through the wavelets are used as input to a k-nn classifier. The correct classification results are obtained as 93.9% for the complex wavelets and 70.3% for the real wavelets.

► Analysis of Fine Needle Aspiration Cytology (FNAC) samples of breast tissue. ► New techniques for nuclei texture feature extraction using complex wavelets. ► Nuclei texture variability estimation. ► Comparison of complex and non-complex wavelets textural features of nuclei. ► Potential application for diagnosing lesions in other organs such as lung, prostate, uterine cervix and bladder.