Machine Learning Applications in Breast Cancer Diagnosis

Abstract

Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of death in women worldwide. Early detection is the key to reduce the mortality rates. Mammography screening has proven to be one of the effective tools for diagnosis of breast cancer. Computer aided diagnosis (CAD) system is a fast, reliable, and cost-effective tool in assisting the radiologists/physicians for diagnosis of breast cancer. CAD systems play an increasingly important role in the clinics by providing a second opinion. Clinical trials have shown that CAD systems have improved the accuracy of breast cancer detection. A typical CAD system involves three major steps i.e. segmentation of suspected lesions, feature extraction and classification of these regions into normal or abnormal class and further into benign or malignant stages. The diagnostics ability of any CAD system is dependent on accurate segmentation, feature extraction techniques and most importantly classification tools that have ability to discriminate the normal tissues from the abnormal tissues. In this chapter we discuss the application of machine learning algorithms e.g. ANN, binary tree, SVM, etc. together with segmentation and feature extraction techniques in a CAD system development. Various methods used in the detection and diagnosis of breast lesions in mammography are reviewed. A brief introduction of machine learning tools, used in diagnosis and their classification performance on various segmentation and feature extraction techniques is presented.