DNA: Directional neighborhood analysis for detection of breast masses in screening mammograms

Nevine H. Eltonsy, Georgia D. Tourassi, Piotr A. Habas, Adel S. Elmaghraby

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

8 Scopus citations

Abstract

We introduce a computer-assisted detection (CAD) system for the automated detection of breast masses in screening mammograms. The system targets the directional behavior of the neighborhood pixels surrounding a reference image pixel. The underlying hypothesis is that in the presence of a mass the directional properties of the breast tissue surrounding the mass should be altered. The hypothesis was tested using a database of 1,337 mammographic regions of interest (ROIs) extracted from DDSM mammograms. There were 681 ROIs containing a biopsy-proven mass centered in the ROI (340 malignant, 341 benign) and 656 ROIs depicting normal breast parenchyma. Initially, eight main directional propagations were identified and modeled given the center of the ROI as the reference pixel. Subsequently, eight novel morphological features were extracted for each direction. The features were designed to characterize the disturbance occurring in normal breast parenchyma due to the presence of a mass. Finally, the extracted features were merged using a back propagation neural network (BPANN). The network served as a non linear classifier trained to determine the presence of a mass centered at the reference image pixel. The BPANN was trained and tested using a leave-one-out sampling scheme. Its performance was evaluated with Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) analysis. Our CAD system showed an ROC area index of Az=0.88±0.01 for discriminating mass vs. normal ROIs. Detection performance was robust for both malignant (Az=0.88±0.01) and benign masses (Az=0.87±0.01). Thus, the proposed directional neighborhood analysis (DNA) can be applied effectively to identify suspicious masses in screening mammograms.

Original languageEnglish
Article number05
Pages (from-to)38-47
Number of pages10
JournalProgress in Biomedical Optics and Imaging - Proceedings of SPIE
Volume5747
Issue numberI
DOIs
StatePublished - 2005
Externally publishedYes
EventMedical Imaging 2005 - Image Processing - San Diego, CA, United States
Duration: Feb 13 2005Feb 17 2005

Keywords

  • Computer-aided diagnosis
  • Mammography
  • Mathematical morphology
  • Neural networks

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