Morphological operation and scaled Réyni entropy based approach for masses detection in mammograms

Abstract

Detection of suspicious masses in mammograms play a vital role in early diagnosis of breast cancer, to reduce the death rate among women. The presence of masses and calcification’s in mammograms is distinguishing signs for breast cancer diagnosis. But in some cases, due to contrast variation, fuzzy boundaries and presence of noise in mammograms, segmentation and detection of masses is challenging assignment. This paper presents a new segmentation approach to detect masses in mammographic images. The proposed approach consist of artifacts elimination and pectoral region extraction, suspicious mass enhancement using dual morphological operation technique and finally, extraction of Regions of Interest (ROIs) from background using scaled Reyni entropy. The proposed system has been tested on two data-sets i.e. mini- Mammographic Image Analysis Society (mini-MIAS) and Digital Database for Screening Mammography (DDSM), over 50 and 90 mammograms respectively. Performance achieved with proposed system in terms of True Positive Fraction (TPF) yields 93.2% and 93.9% respectively, at the rate of 1.48 and 0.74 average False Positive per Image (FP/I), tested on both Cranio-Caudal (CC) and Medio-Lateral Oblique (MLO) views. The obtained experimental results demonstrates that proposed method gives improved results for mass detection and can be useful for radiologists in diagnosis of breast cancer at early stage.