Shape factors for analysis of breast tumors in mammograms

Distinguishing between benign and malignant breast tumors requires careful analysis of their shape complexity and radiographic definition. In this paper we examine the usefulness of shape factors such as compactness, moments, Fourier descriptors, and statistics of chord lengths in distinguishing between circumscribed/spiculated and benign/malignant masses. A database of 54 tumors was used in pattern classification experiments. Classification accuracies of 95% for circumscribed/spiculated, 76% for benign/malignant, and 77% for four-group classification were obtained, which indicate the usefulness of the proposed methods in breast cancer diagnosis