Automatic Detection of Microcalcifications in Digitized Mammograms using Fuzzy 2-Partition Entropy and Mathematical Morphology

Abstract

Cancer is a leading cause of death among men and women nowadays all over the world. Breast cancer is a most common form of cancer originated from breast tissue among women. Most frequent type of breast cancer is ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) and most frequent symptoms of DCIS recognized by mammography are clusters of Microcalcifications (MCCs). Automatic detection of Microcalcifications is an important task to prevent and treat the disease. In this paper, an effective approach for automatic detection of Microcalcifications in digitized mammograms is proposed. The proposed approach is based on fuzzy 2-partition entropy and mathematical morphology. In the proposed approach, first phase uses fuzzy Gaussian membership function for mammogram fuzzification. In this phase, fuzzy 2-partition entropy approach is used to find bandwidth of the Gaussian function. After this, mathematical morphological enhancement approach is used to enhance the contrast of Microcalcifications in mammograms. Finally, Microcalcifications are located using Otsu threshold selection method. Experiments have been conducted on images of mini-MIAS database (Mammogram Image Analysis Society database (UK)). In order to validate the results, several different kinds of standard test images (fatty, fatty-glandular and denseglandular) of mini-MIAS database are considered. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach has an ability to detect Microcalcifications even in dense mammograms. The results of proposed approach are quite promising. The proposed approach can be a part of developing a computer aided decision (CAD) system for early detection of breast cancer.