title: Breast cancer diagnosis in digitized mammograms using curvelet moments.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Feature extraction is a key issue in designing a computer aided diagnosis system. Recent researches on breast cancer diagnosis have reported the effectiveness of multiscale transforms (wavelets and curvelets) for mammogram analysis and have shown the superiority of curvelet transform. However, the curse of dimensionality problem arises when using the curvelet coefficients and therefore a reduction method is required to extract a reduced set of discriminative features.
  
  
  METHODS
  This paper deals with this problem and proposes a feature extraction method based on curvelet transform and moment theory for mammogram description. First, we performed discrete curvelet transform and we computed the four first-order moments from curvelet coefficients distribution. Hence, two feature sets can be obtained: moments from each band and moments from each level. In this work, both sets are studied. Then, the t-test ranking technique was applied to select the best features from each set. Finally, a k-nearest neighbor classifier was used to distinguish between normal and abnormal breast tissues and to classify tumors as malignant or benign. Experiments were performed on 252 mammograms from the Mammographic Image Analysis Society (mini-MIAS) database using the leave-one-out cross validation as well as on 11553 mammograms from the Digital Database for Screening Mammography (DDSM) database using 2×5-fold cross validation.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Experimental results prove the effectiveness and the superiority of curvelet moments for mammogram analysis. Indeed, results on the mini-MIAS database show that curvelet moments yield an accuracy of 91.27% (resp. 81.35 %) with 10 (resp. 8) features for abnormality (resp. malignancy) detection. In addition, empirical comparisons of the proposed method against state-of-the-art curvelet-based methods on the DDSM database show that the suggested method does not only lead to a more reduced feature set, but it also statistically outperforms all the compared methods in terms of accuracy.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  In summary, curvelet moments are an efficient and effective way to extract a reduced set of discriminative features for breast cancer diagnosis.
authors.affiliation: Research Team on Intelligent Systems in Imaging and Artificial Vision (SIIVA) - RIADI Laboratory, ISI, 2 Street Abou Rayhane Bayrouni, 2080 Ariana, Tunisia. Electronic address: sami_dhahbi@yahoo.fr.
authors.forename: Sami
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Dhahbi
authors.affiliation: Research Team on Intelligent Systems in Imaging and Artificial Vision (SIIVA) - RIADI Laboratory, ISI, 2 Street Abou Rayhane Bayrouni, 2080 Ariana, Tunisia. Electronic address: walid.barhoumi@esti.rnu.tn.
authors.forename: Walid
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Barhoumi
authors.affiliation: Research Team on Intelligent Systems in Imaging and Artificial Vision (SIIVA) - RIADI Laboratory, ISI, 2 Street Abou Rayhane Bayrouni, 2080 Ariana, Tunisia. Electronic address: e.zagrouba@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Ezzeddine
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Zagrouba
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001943:Breast Neoplasms / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D016208:Databases, Factual; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D008327:Mammography / Q000379:methods*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results
keywords: Breast cancer diagnosis; Curvelet moments; Curvelet transform; Feature reduction; Mammography