Mammographic mass classification using filter response patches

Abstract

Considering the importance of early diagnosis of breast cancer, a supervised patch‐wise texton‐based approach has been developed for the classification of mass abnormalities in mammograms. The proposed method is based on texture‐based classification of masses in mammograms and does not require segmentation of the mass region. In this approach, patches from filter bank responses are utilised for generating the texton dictionary. The methodology is evaluated on the publicly available Digital Database for Screening Mammography database. Using a naive Bayes classifier, a classification accuracy of 83% with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.89 was obtained. Experimental results demonstrated that the patch‐wise texton‐based approach in conjunction with the naive Bayes classifier constructs an efficient and alternative approach for automatic mammographic mass classification.

Keywords

• receiver operating characteristic curve
• naive Bayes classifier
• Digital Database-for-Screening Mammography database
• texton dictionary generation
• filter bank responses
• texture-based mass classification