Breast Masses In Mammograms Research Articles

Combining modified hyper learning binary dragonfly algorithm and deep learning for BI‐RADS classification of breast masses in mammograms

AbstractBackgroundIt has always been difficult and challenging to quantify the breast imaging reporting and data system (BI‐RADS) criteria into several categories. Automatic quantitation can assist clinicians in the early diagnosis and treatment eventually reducing the mortality rate. As a result, in the recent years, early BC diagnosis methods based on pathological breast images have been in high demand.MethodWe propose a computer‐aided diagnosis (CAD) system that combines the transfer learning approach with meta‐heuristic optimization, and machine learning to classify BI‐RADS breast masses categories within levels 3 and 4. Transfer learning technique ResNet‐18 is used for high‐level feature extraction. The clinically important features are then chosen using a modified feature selection technique based on the Hyper Learning Binary DragonFly Algorithm (M‐HLBDA). Finally, a Fine K‐nearest neighbour (KNN) is employed for classification.ResultA series of mammography breast mass images from the curated breast imaging subset of DDSM (CBIS‐DDSM) are evaluated in order to categorize within BI‐RADS levels 3 and 4. Experimental findings demonstrated M‐HLBDA capability to identify the optimal feature subset, which minimizes the number of selected features and maximizes the classification. Our system attained classification accuracy of 87.5%, Sensitivity of 88.8%, Specificity of 86.5%, and AUC of 0.82 using KNN on selected features using M‐HLBDA.ConclusionOur model can annotate and classify BI‐RADS levels 3 and 4 with better classification accuracy, and it may be used as an automated system to help radiologists.

Machine learning based computer aided diagnosis system for classification of breast masses in mammograms

Breast cancer continues to be the most common cancer in the fastest developing and the developed nations. Early detection by using mammography has been proven as the best prognosis. Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems are being used as second reader for the analysis and interpretation of mammogram images. In the last two decades, although breast cancer incidence has increased by many folds but unfortunately the progress in this field has almost stagnated. Therefore, the CAD systems need to be improved to be considered useful. In this study, a machine learning based CAD system for segmentation and classification of breast masses have been proposed. The IRMA Version of DDSM dataset has been used for experimentation and evaluation of the proposed system. Exact breast masses were segmented from manually extracted ROIs of 700*700 pixels by employing an improved seeded region growing algorithm. Various geometry and texture features were computed from the segmented mass lesions and corresponding ROIs respectively. The classification performances of nine state-of-the-art classifiers namely K-Nearest Neighbour (KNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), Multi-class Support Vector Machine (mSVM), Decision Tree (DT), Discriminate Analysis (DA), Naive Bayes (NB), Random Forest (RF), Ensemble Tree (ET) have been investigated in this study. On evaluating the experimental results for all the classifiers, highest classification accuracy is obtained with SVM classifier. The experimental results reveal that the proposed improved seeded region growing approach has been proven helpful in improving the classification performance of the proposed system.

Comparative analysis of proficiencies of various textures and geometric features in breast mass classification using k-nearest neighbor

This paper introduces a comparative analysis of the proficiencies of various textures and geometric features in the diagnosis of breast masses on mammograms. An improved machine learning-based framework was developed for this study. The proposed system was tested using 106 full field digital mammography images from the INbreast dataset, containing a total of 115 breast mass lesions. The proficiencies of individual and various combinations of computed textures and geometric features were investigated by evaluating their contributions towards attaining higher classification accuracies. Four state-of-the-art filter-based feature selection algorithms (Relief-F, Pearson correlation coefficient, neighborhood component analysis, and term variance) were employed to select the top 20 most discriminative features. The Relief-F algorithm outperformed other feature selection algorithms in terms of classification results by reporting 85.2% accuracy, 82.0% sensitivity, and 88.0% specificity. A set of nine most discriminative features were then selected, out of the earlier mentioned 20 features obtained using Relief-F, as a result of further simulations. The classification performances of six state-of-the-art machine learning classifiers, namely k-nearest neighbor (k-NN), support vector machine, decision tree, Naive Bayes, random forest, and ensemble tree, were investigated, and the obtained results revealed that the best classification results (accuracy = 90.4%, sensitivity = 92.0%, specificity = 88.0%) were obtained for the k-NN classifier with the number of neighbors having k = 5 and squared inverse distance weight. The key findings include the identification of the nine most discriminative features, that is, FD26 (Fourier Descriptor), Euler number, solidity, mean, FD14, FD13, periodicity, skewness, and contrast out of a pool of 125 texture and geometric features. The proposed results revealed that the selected nine features can be used for the classification of breast masses in mammograms.

Automatic Breast Mass Segmentation and Classification Using Subtraction of Temporally Sequential Digital Mammograms

Cancer remains a major cause of morbidity and mortality globally, with 1 in 5 of all new cancers arising in the breast. The introduction of mammography for the radiological diagnosis of breast abnormalities, significantly decreased their mortality rates. Accurate detection and classification of breast masses in mammograms is especially challenging for various reasons, including low contrast and the normal variations of breast tissue density. Various Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems are being developed to assist radiologists with the accurate classification of breast abnormalities. In this study, subtraction of temporally sequential digital mammograms and machine learning are proposed for the automatic segmentation and classification of masses. The performance of the algorithm was evaluated on a dataset created especially for the purposes of this study, with 320 images from 80 patients (two time points and two views of each breast) with precisely annotated mass locations by two radiologists. Ninety-six features were extracted and ten classifiers were tested in a leave-one-patient-out and k-fold cross-validation process. Using Neural Networks, the detection of masses was 99.9% accurate. The classification accuracy of the masses as benign or suspicious increased from 92.6%, using the state-of-the-art temporal analysis, to 98%, using the proposed methodology. The improvement was statistically significant (p-value < 0.05). These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the subtraction of temporally consecutive mammograms for the diagnosis of breast masses. Clinical and Translational Impact Statement: The proposed algorithm has the potential to substantially contribute to the development of automated breast cancer Computer-Aided Diagnosis systems with significant impact on patient prognosis.

Discriminative Localized Sparse Approximations for Mass Characterization in Mammograms.

The most common form of cancer among women in both developed and developing countries is breast cancer. The early detection and diagnosis of this disease is significant because it may reduce the number of deaths caused by breast cancer and improve the quality of life of those effected. Computer-aided detection (CADe) and computer-aided diagnosis (CADx) methods have shown promise in recent years for aiding in the human expert reading analysis and improving the accuracy and reproducibility of pathology results. One significant application of CADe and CADx is for breast cancer screening using mammograms. In image processing and machine learning research, relevant results have been produced by sparse analysis methods to represent and recognize imaging patterns. However, application of sparse analysis techniques to the biomedical field is challenging, as the objects of interest may be obscured because of contrast limitations or background tissues, and their appearance may change because of anatomical variability. We introduce methods for label-specific and label-consistent dictionary learning to improve the separation of benign breast masses from malignant breast masses in mammograms. We integrated these approaches into our Spatially Localized Ensemble Sparse Analysis (SLESA) methodology. We performed 10- and 30-fold cross validation (CV) experiments on multiple mammography datasets to measure the classification performance of our methodology and compared it to deep learning models and conventional sparse representation. Results from these experiments show the potential of this methodology for separation of malignant from benign masses as a part of a breast cancer screening workflow.

An Efficient Method for Automated Breast Mass Segmentation and Classification in Digital Mammograms

Background: Automatic detection and classification of breast masses in mammograms are still challenging tasks. Today, computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems are being developed to assist radiologists in interpreting mammograms. Objectives: This study aimed to provide a novel method for automatic segmentation and classification of masses in mammograms to help radiologists make an accurate diagnosis. Materials and Methods: For an efficient mass diagnosis in mammograms, we proposed an automatic scheme to perform both mass detection and classification. First, a combination of several image enhancement algorithms, including contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE), guided imaging, and median filtering, was investigated to enhance the visual features of breast area and increase the accuracy of segmentation outcomes. Second, the density of discrete wavelet coefficient density (DDWCs), based on the quincunx lifting scheme (QLS), was proposed to find suspicious mass regions or regions of interest (ROIs). Finally, mass lesions that appeared in the mammogram were classified into four categories of benign, probably benign, malignant, and probably malignant, based on the morphological shape. The proposed method was evaluated among 1593 images from the Curated Breast Imaging Subset-Digital Database for Screening Mammography (CBIS-DDSM) dataset. Results: The experimental results revealed that the suspected region localization had 100% sensitivity, with a mean of 6.4 ± 4.5 false positive (FP) detections per image. Moreover, the results showed an overall accuracy of 85.9% and an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.901 for the mass classification algorithm. Conclusion: The present results showed the comparable performance of our proposed method to that of the state-of-the-art methods.

Multi-scale attention-based convolutional neural network for classification of breast masses in mammograms.

Breast cancer is the cancer with the highest incidence in women, and early detection can effectively improve the survival rate of patients. Mammography is an important method for physicians to screening breast cancer, but the diagnosis of mammograms by physicians depends largely on clinical practice experience. Studies have shown that using computer-aided diagnosis techniques can help doctors diagnose breast cancer. In this paper, the method of convolutional neural network is mainly used to classify benign and malignant breast masses in the mammograms. First, we use multi-scale residual networks and densely connected networks as backbone networks to extract the features of global image patches and local image patches. Second, we use the attention module named convolutional block attention module (CBAM) to improve the two feature extraction networks to enhance the network's feature expression ability. Finally, we fuse the features of multi-scale image patches to achieve the classification of benign and malignant breast masses. In the digital database for screening mammography (DDSM) database, the accuracy, sensitivity, AUC value and corresponding standard deviation of our method are 0.9626±0.0110, 0.9719±0.0126, and 0.9576±0.0064, respectively. Compared with the commonly used ResNet (AUC=0.8823±0.0112) and DenseNet (AUC=0.9141±0.0085), the performance of our method has improved. In addition, we also used the INbreast database to train and validate the proposed method. The accuracy, sensitivity, AUC and corresponding standard deviations are 0.9554±0.0296, 0.9605±0.0228, and 0.9468±0.0085, respectively. Compared with the previous work, our proposed method uses multi-scale image features, has better classification performance in breast mass patches classification tasks, and can effectively assist physicians in breast cancer diagnosis.

Breast Cancer Classification Using Deep Convolution Neural Network with Transfer Learning

In this paper, we aim to apply deep learning convolution neural network (Deep-CNN) technology to classify breast masses in mammograms. We develop a Deep-CNN combined with multi-feature extraction and transfer learning to detect breast cancer. The Deep-CNN is utilized to extract features from mammograms. A support vector machine (SVM) is then trained on the Deep-CNN features to classify normal, benign, and cancer cases. The scoring features from the Deep-CNN are coupled with texture features and used as inputs to the final classifier. Two texture features are included: texture features of spatial dependency and gradient-based histograms. Both are employed to locate breast masses in mammograms. Next we apply transfer learning to the classifier of the SVM. Four techniques are devised for the experimental evaluation of the proposed system. The fourth technique combines the Deep-CNN with texture features and local features extracted by the scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) algorithm. Experiments are designed to measure the performance of the various techniques. The results demonstrate that the proposed CNN coupled with the texture features and the SIFT outperforms the other models and performs best with transfer learning embedded. The accuracy of this model is 97.8%, with a true positive rate of 98.45% and a true negative rate of 96%.

Comparison of Current Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for the Segmentation of Breast Masses in Mammograms

Breast cancer causes approximately 684,996 deaths worldwide, making it the leading cause of female cancer mortality. However, these figures can be reduced with early diagnosis through mammographic imaging, allowing for the timely and effective treatment of this disease. To establish the best tools for contributing to the automatic diagnosis of breast cancer, different deep learning (DL) architectures were compared in terms of breast lesion segmentation, lesion type classification, and degree of suspicion of malignancy tests. The tasks were completed with state-of-the-art architectures and backbones. Initially, during segmentation, the base UNet, Visual Geometry Group 19 (VGG19), InceptionResNetV2, EfficientNet, MobileNetv2, ResNet, ResNeXt, MultiResUNet, linkNet-VGG19, DenseNet, SEResNet and SeResNeXt architectures were compared, where “Res” denotes a residual network. In addition, training was performed with 5 of the most advanced loss functions and validated by the Dice coefficient, sensitivity, and specificity. The proposed models achieved Dice values above 90%, with the EfficientNet architecture achieving 94.75% and 99% accuracy on the two tasks. Subsequently, classification was addressed with the ResNet50V2, VGG19, InceptionResNetV2, DenseNet121, InceptionV3, Xception and EfficientNetB7 networks. The proposed models achieved 96.97% and 97.73% accuracy through the VGG19 and ResNet50V2 networks on the lesion classification and degree of suspicion tasks, respectively. All three tasks were addressed with open-access databases, including the Digital Database for Screening Mammography (DDSM), the Mammographic Image Analysis Society (MIAS) database, and INbreast.

Classification of breast masses in mammograms using geometric and topological feature maps and shape distribution

Breast cancer is the second most common cancer in the world, being more common among women and representing 24.2% of new cases each year. Mammography is currently the best technique for early detection of non-palpable breast lesions. Due to the need to create new more computationally efficient techniques, this paper presents a methodology for mass classification from mammographic images based on their geometric and topological features. For each image, two spatial feature maps named distance map and surface map are computed. These features describe the mass geometry and topology, respectively. Also, shape descriptors based on distances histograms are used to characterize the shape of the masses. The purpose of this comparison is to discriminate its malignancy and benignity patterns. The high-boost filter is applied to enhance the masses, since the difference between them and the breast tissue or other components of them is very subtle. Mammograms digitized from the Digital Database for Screening Mammography (DDSM) were used for the testing of this methodology, corresponding to 794 ROIs that were separated into groups by density, according to BI-RADS classification. The best results for accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity were 93.70%, 96.29%, and 91.05%, respectively, for density 2 and 90.18%, 91.01%, and 89.94% for all images. The results obtained demonstrate that the sets of features successfully discriminate mass standards, even with the exceptions and obstacles that characterize and classify the masses through their shape.

A New Computer-Aided Diagnosis System with Modified Genetic Feature Selection for BI-RADS Classification of Breast Masses in Mammograms.

Mammography remains the most prevalent imaging tool for early breast cancer screening. The language used to describe abnormalities in mammographic reports is based on the Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System (BI-RADS). Assigning a correct BI-RADS category to each examined mammogram is a strenuous and challenging task for even experts. This paper proposes a new and effective computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system to classify mammographic masses into four assessment categories in BI-RADS. The mass regions are first enhanced by means of histogram equalization and then semiautomatically segmented based on the region growing technique. A total of 130 handcrafted BI-RADS features are then extracted from the shape, margin, and density of each mass, together with the mass size and the patient's age, as mentioned in BI-RADS mammography. Then, a modified feature selection method based on the genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed to select the most clinically significant BI-RADS features. Finally, a back-propagation neural network (BPN) is employed for classification, and its accuracy is used as the fitness in GA. A set of 500 mammogram images from the digital database for screening mammography (DDSM) is used for evaluation. Our system achieves classification accuracy, positive predictive value, negative predictive value, and Matthews correlation coefficient of 84.5%, 84.4%, 94.8%, and 79.3%, respectively. To our best knowledge, this is the best current result for BI-RADS classification of breast masses in mammography, which makes the proposed system promising to support radiologists for deciding proper patient management based on the automatically assigned BI-RADS categories.

AUNet: attention-guided dense-upsampling networks for breast mass segmentation in whole mammograms

Mammography is one of the most commonly applied tools for early breast cancer screening. Automatic segmentation of breast masses in mammograms is essential but challenging due to the low signal-to-noise ratio and the wide variety of mass shapes and sizes. Existing methods deal with these challenges mainly by extracting mass-centered image patches manually or automatically. However, manual patch extraction is time-consuming and automatic patch extraction brings errors that could not be compensated in the following segmentation step. In this study, we propose a novel attention-guided dense-upsampling network (AUNet) for accurate breast mass segmentation in whole mammograms directly. In AUNet, we employ an asymmetrical encoder–decoder structure and propose an effective upsampling block, attention-guided dense-upsampling block (AU block). Especially, the AU block is designed to have three merits. Firstly, it compensates the information loss of bilinear upsampling by dense upsampling. Secondly, it designs a more effective method to fuse high- and low-level features. Thirdly, it includes a channel-attention function to highlight rich-information channels. We evaluated the proposed method on two publicly available datasets, CBIS-DDSM and INbreast. Compared to three state-of-the-art fully convolutional networks, AUNet achieved the best performances with an average Dice similarity coefficient of 81.8% for CBIS-DDSM and 79.1% for INbreast.

A Novel Multi-Scale Adversarial Networks for Precise Segmentation of X-Ray Breast Mass

With the constant changes of people's lifestyle and living environment, the morbidity of breast cancer is increasing year by year. It is highly imperative to develop an effective breast mass segmentation method for early breast cancer diagnosis. However, segmenting breast masses in mammograms is still one hot issue with enormous challenges because of masses' irregular shapes and various sizes. In this study, we propose multi-adversarial learning to capture multi-scale image information for accurate breast mass segmentation. To effectively reinforce higher-order consistency in the segmentation results, the proposed network introduces the idea of adversarial networks, mainly consisting of a segmentation network and a discrimination network. An improved U-Net is introduced as the segmentation network to generate masks of the suspicious regions, while the discrimination network combines three convolutional critic networks that operate at different scales to discriminate the input masks. To weaken the unbalanced class problem and produce fine-grained segmentation results, weighted cross entropy loss and Earth-Mover distance are jointly used as an integrated loss function to guide the optimization process. Furthermore, the spectral normalization is adopted to the critics to alleviate the instability of training. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated on two public datasets (INbreast and CBIS-DDSM). Experimental results empirically demonstrate that our method outperforms FCNs-based methods and the state-of-the-art method with dice of 81.64% for INbreast and 82.16% for CBIS-DDSM.

Classification of Breast Masses in Mammograms Using 2D Homomorphic Transform Features and Supervised Classifiers

Classification of Breast Masses in Mammograms Using 2D Homomorphic Transform Features and Supervised Classifiers

A FCM Based Approach for Automated Segmentation of Breast Masses in Mammograms

A FCM Based Approach for Automated Segmentation of Breast Masses in Mammograms

The Impact of Pixel Resolution, Integration Scale, Preprocessing, and Feature Normalization on Texture Analysis for Mass Classification in Mammograms

Texture analysis methods are widely used to characterize breast masses in mammograms. Texture gives information about the spatial arrangement of the intensities in the region of interest. This information has been used in mammogram analysis applications such as mass detection, mass classification, and breast density estimation. In this paper, we study the effect of factors such as pixel resolution, integration scale, preprocessing, and feature normalization on the performance of those texture methods for mass classification. The classification performance was assessed considering linear and nonlinear support vector machine classifiers. To find the best combination among the studied factors, we used three approaches: greedy, sequential forward selection (SFS), and exhaustive search. On the basis of our study, we conclude that the factors studied affect the performance of texture methods, so the best combination of these factors should be determined to achieve the best performance with each texture method. SFS can be an appropriate way to approach the factor combination problem because it is less computationally intensive than the other methods.

An efficient fractal method for detection and diagnosis of breast masses in mammograms.

In this paper, we present an efficient fractal method for detection and diagnosis of mass lesion in mammogram which is one of the abnormalities in mammographic images. We used 110 images that were carefully selected by a radiologist, and their abnormalities were also confirmed by biopsy. These images included circumscribed benign, ill-defined, and spiculated malignant masses. Firstly, we discriminated lesions automatically using new fractal dimensions. The results which were examined by different types of breast density showed that the proposed method was able to yield quite satisfactory detection results. Secondly, noting that contours of masses playing the most important role in diagnosis of different mass types, we defined new fractal features based on information extraction from the contours. This information is able to identify the roughness in mass contours and determines the extent of spiculation or smoothness of the masses. In this manner, in classification of the spiculated malignant masses from the circumscribed benign tumors, we achieved highly satisfactory results, i.e., 0.98 measured in terms of area under ROC curve (AUC). In this paper, it is also shown that the roughness in contours is a suitable characteristic feature for diagnosis of ill-defined malignant tumors with AUC equal to 0.94 in their classification. The extracted information was also found to be useful in the classification of early malignancies whereas in the classification of spiculated and ill-defined malignant masses in their early stage from those of benign tumors, we achieved high accuracy of 0.99 and 0.90 for AUC, respectively.

Mammographical mass detection and classification using Local Seed Region Growing–Spherical Wavelet Transform (LSRG–SWT) hybrid scheme

The purpose of this study is to implement accurate methods of detection and classification of benign and malignant breast masses in mammograms. Our new proposed method, which can be used as a diagnostic tool, is denoted Local Seed Region Growing–Spherical Wavelet Transform (LSRG–SWT), and consists of four steps. The first step is homomorphic filtering for enhancement, and the second is detection of the region of interests (ROIs) using a Local Seed Region Growing (LSRG) algorithm, which we developed. The third step incoporates Spherical Wavelet Transform (SWT) and feature extraction. Finally the fourth step is classification, which consists of two sequential components: the 1st classification distinguishes the ROIs as either mass or non-mass and the 2nd classification distinguishes the masses as either benign or malignant using a Support Vector Machine (SVM). The mammograms used in this study were acquired from the hospital of Istanbul University (I.U.) in Turkey and the Mammographic Image Analysis Society (MIAS). The results demonstrate that the proposed scheme LSRG–SWT achieves 96% and 93.59% accuracy in mass/non-mass classification (1st component) and benign/malignant classification (2nd component) respectively when using the I.U. database with k-fold cross validation. The system achieves 94% and 91.67% accuracy in mass/non-mass classification and benign/malignant classification respectively when using the I.U. database as a training set and the MIAS database as a test set with external validation.

Fractal Analysis of Breast Masses in Mammograms

Fractal analysis is useful in digital image processing for the characterization of shape roughness and gray-scale texture or complexity. Breast masses present shape and gray-scale characteristics in mammograms that vary between benign masses and malignant tumors. This book demonstrates the use of fractal analysis to classify breast masses as benign masses or malignant tumors based on the irregularity exhibited in their contours and the gray-scale variability exhibited in their mammographic images. A few different approaches are described to estimate the fractal dimension (FD) of the contour of a mass, including the ruler method, box-counting method, and the power spectral analysis (PSA) method. Procedures are also described for the estimation of the FD of the gray-scale image of a mass using the blanket method and the PSA method. To facilitate comparative analysis of FD as a feature for pattern classification of breast masses, several other shape features and texture measures are desc ibed in the book. The shape features described include compactness, spiculation index, fractional concavity, and Fourier factor. The texture measures described are statistical measures derived from the gray-level cooccurrence matrix of the given image. Texture measures reveal properties about the spatial distribution of the gray levels in the given image; therefore, the performance of texture measures may be dependent on the resolution of the image. For this reason, an analysis of the effect of spatial resolution or pixel size on texture measures in the classification of breast masses is presented in the book. The results demonstrated in the book indicate that fractal analysis is more suitable for characterization of the shape than the gray-level variations of breast masses, with area under the receiver operating characteristics of up to 0.93 with a dataset of 111 mammographic images of masses. The methods and results presented in the book are useful for computer-aided diagnosis of br ast cancer. Table of Contents: Computer-Aided Diagnosis of Breast Cancer / Detection and Analysis ofnewline Breast Masses / Datasets of Images of Breast Masses / Methods for Fractal Analysis / Pattern Classification / Results of Classification of Breast Masses / Concluding Remarks

Fractal analysis and classification of breast masses using the power spectra of signatures of contours

The contours of benign masses and malignant tumors in mammograms and other types of breast images differ substantially in their shape and complexity; the former are usually round and smooth, whereas the latter are typically spiculated and irregular. We demonstrate the usefulness of fractal analysis via a frequency domain approach applied to one-dimensional signatures of the two-dimensional contours of breast masses in mammograms. The 1/f model related to fractional Brownian motion was applied via power spectral analysis of signatures to estimate the fractal dimension. Experiments with a dataset of 111 contours, including those of 65 benign masses and 46 malignant tumors, indicated a high classification performance of 0.8962 in terms of the area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve. The method should be useful in computer-aided diagnosis of breast cancer.