Texture features analysis technique to detect mass lesion in digitized mammogram images

Abstract

Mass lesions are one of the breast cancer tumors. Mammogram images are the first screening tool to detect tumors in the women breast, but due to radiologist fatigue, number of false positive (FP) and false negative (FN) rates are increased. The main objective of this paper is to develop an intelligent computer aided diagnosis (CAD) system that can accurately detect mass lesions in digitized mammogram images. The proposed method has three stages. The first stage is a preprocessing stage, where the mass lesion is enhanced using a customized Laplacian filter. Then, multi-statistical filters are implemented to detect a potential mass lesion in the mammogram images. In the final stage, the number detected FP regions are reduced using five texture features. The proposed algorithm is evaluated using 45 mammogram images and the algorithm achieved an accuracy rate of 97% in detecting mass lesion with 83% sensitivity rate and 98% specificity rate.