Detection of breast masses in mammograms by density slicing and texture flow-field analysis

We propose a method for the detection of masses in mammographic images that employs Gaussian smoothing and sub-sampling operations as preprocessing steps. The mass portions are segmented by establishing intensity links from the central portions of masses into the surrounding areas. We introduce methods for analyzing oriented flow-like textural information in mammograms. Features based on flow orientation in adaptive ribbons of pixels across the margins of masses are proposed to classify the regions detected as true mass regions or false-positives (FPs). The methods yielded a mass versus normal tissue classification accuracy represented as an area (Az) of 0.87 under the receiver operating characteristics (ROCs) curve with a dataset of 56 images including 30 benign disease, 13 malignant disease, and 13 normal cases selected from the mini Mammographic Image Analysis Society database. A sensitivity of 81% was achieved at 2.2 FPs/image. Malignant tumor versus normal tissue classification resulted in a higher Az value of 0.9 under the ROC curve using only the 13 malignant and 13 normal cases with a sensitivity of 85% at 2.45 FPs/image. The mass detection algorithm could detect all the 13 malignant tumors successfully, but achieved a success rate of only 63% (19/30) in detecting the benign masses. The mass regions that were successfully segmented were further classified as benign or malignant disease by computing five texture features based on gray-level co-occurrence matrices (GCMs) and using the features in a logistic regression method. The features were computed using adaptive ribbons of pixels across the boundaries of the masses. Benign versus malignant classification using the GCM-based texture features resulted in Az = 0.79 with 19 benign and 13 malignant cases.