Digital mammography: comparison of adaptive and nonadaptive CAD methods for mass detection

The authors compared the performance of adaptive and nonadaptive computer-aided diagnostic (CAD) methods for breast mass detection with digital mammography.

Both adaptive and nonadaptive modular CAD methods employed recent advances in multiresolution and mutiorientation wavelet transforms for improved feature extraction. The nonadaptive method uses fixed parameters for the image preprocessing modules. The adaptive method, a new class of algorithms, adapts to image content by selecting parameters for the image preprocessing modules within a parameter range. Comparison of the two methods was performed for each individual CAD module with a region-of-interest (ROI) database containing all mass types and normal tissue.

Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis clearly demonstrated an improvement in performance for the three adaptive modules and a significant overall difference between the two methods. The average ROC area index (Az) values were 0.86 and 0.95 for the nonadaptive and adaptive methods, respectively. The corresponding P value is .0145. For a previously reported database of full mammographic images containing 50 abnormal cases with all mass types and 50 normal images, the adaptive CAD method had a sensitivity of 96% (1.71 false-positive results per image) compared with 89% (1.91 false-positive results per image) for the nonadaptive CAD method.

The adaptive CAD method demonstrated better performance. A study is in progress to determine the generalizability of the adaptive CAD method by applying it to larger retrospective image databases with different film digitizers.