Breast mass classification on mammograms using radial local ternary patterns

Abstract

Textural features can be useful in differentiating between benign and malignant breast lesions on mammograms. Unlike previous computerized schemes, which relied largely on shape and margin features based on manual contours of masses, textural features can be determined from regions of interest (ROIs) without precise lesion segmentation. In this study, therefore, we investigated an ROI-based feature, namely, radial local ternary patterns (RLTP), which takes into account the direction of edge patterns with respect to the center of masses for classification of ROIs for benign and malignant masses. Using an artificial neural network (ANN), support vector machine (SVM) and random forest (RF) classifiers, the classification abilities of RLTP were compared with those of the regular local ternary patterns (LTP), rotation invariant uniform (RIU2) LTP, texture features based on the gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM), and wavelet features. The performance was evaluated with 376 ROIs including 181 malignant and 195 benign masses. The highest areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves among three classifiers were 0.90, 0.77, 0.78, 0.86, and 0.83 for RLTP, LTP, RIU2-LTP, GLCM, and wavelet features, respectively. The results indicate the usefulness of the proposed texture features for distinguishing between benign and malignant lesions and the superiority of the radial patterns compared with the conventional rotation invariant patterns.