title: On combining morphological component analysis and concentric morphology model for mammographic mass detection.
abstract: Mammographic mass detection is an important task for the early diagnosis of breast cancer. However, it is difficult to distinguish masses from normal regions because of their abundant morphological characteristics and ambiguous margins. To improve the mass detection performance, it is essential to effectively preprocess mammogram to preserve both the intensity distribution and morphological characteristics of regions. In this paper, morphological component analysis is first introduced to decompose a mammogram into a piecewise-smooth component and a texture component. The former is utilized in our detection scheme as it effectively suppresses both structural noises and effects of blood vessels. Then, we propose two novel concentric layer criteria to detect different types of suspicious regions in a mammogram. The combination is evaluated based on the Digital Database for Screening Mammography, where 100 malignant cases and 50 benign cases are utilized. The sensitivity of the proposed scheme is 99% in malignant, 88% in benign, and 95.3% in all types of cases. The results show that the proposed detection scheme achieves satisfactory detection performance and preferable compromises between sensitivity and false positive rates.
authors.affiliation: School of Electronic Engineering, Xidian University, Xi'an 710071, China. xbgao@mail.xidian.edu.cn
authors.forename: Xinbo
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Gao
authors.forename: Ying
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Xuelong
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Dacheng
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Tao
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001940:Breast / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000473:pathology; D001943:Breast Neoplasms / Q000175:diagnosis*; D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D016208:Databases, Factual; D005189:False Positive Reactions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D008327:Mammography / Q000379:methods*; D011237:Predictive Value of Tests