Computer-Aided Diagnostic System based on Wavelet Analysis for Microcalcification Detection in Digital Mammograms

Clusters of microcalcifications in mammograms are an important early sign of breast cancer in women. In this paper an approach is proposed to develop a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system that can be very helpful for radiologist in diagnosing microcalcifications´ patterns in digitized mammograms earlier and faster than typical screening programs. The proposed method has been implemented in three stages: (a) the region of interest (ROI) selection of 32times32 pixels size which identifies clusters of microcalcifications, (b) the feature extraction stage is based on the wavelet decomposition of locally processed image (region of interest) to compute the important features of each cluster and (c) the classification stage, which classify between normal and microcalcifications´ patterns and then classify between benign and malignant microcalcifications. In classification stage, four methods were used, the voting K-nearest neighbor classifier (K-NN), support vector machine (SVM) classifier, neural network (NN) classifier, and fuzzy classifier. The proposed method was evaluated using the Mammographic Image Analysis Society (MIAS) mammographic databases. The proposed system was shown to have the large potential for microcalcifications detection in digital mammograms.