Regularization in retrieval-driven classification of clustered microcalcifications for breast cancer

We propose a regularization based approach for case-adaptive classification in computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) of breast cancer. The goal is to improve the classification accuracy on a query case by making use of a set of similar cases retrieved from an existing library of known cases. In the proposed approach, a prior is first derived from a traditional CAD classifier (which is typically pre-trained offline on a set of training cases). It is then used together with the retrieved similar cases to obtain an adaptive classifier on the query case. We consider two different forms for the regularization prior: one is fixed for all query cases and the other is allowed to vary with different query cases. In the experiments the proposed approach is demonstrated on a dataset of 1,006 clinical cases. The results show that it could achieve significant improvement in numerical efficiency compared with a previously proposed case adaptive approach (by about an order of magnitude) while maintaining similar (or better) improvement in classification accuracy; it could also adapt faster in performance with a small number of retrieved cases. Measured by the area of under the ROC curve (AUC), the regularization based approach achieved AUC = 0.8215, compared with AUC = 0.7329 for the baseline classifier (P-value = 0.001).