Particle swarm optimization based feature selection in mammogram mass classification

Mammography is currently the most effective method for early detection of breast cancer. This paper proposes an effective technique to classify regions of interests (ROIs) of digitized mammograms into mass and normal tissue regions by first finding the significant texture features of ROI using binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO). The data set used consisted of sixty-nine ROIs from the MIAS Mini-Mammographic database. Eighteen texture features were derived from the gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) of each ROI. Significant features are found by a feature selection technique based on BPSO. The decision tree classifier is then used to classify the test set using these significant features. Experimental results show that the significant texture features found by the BPSO based feature selection technique can have better classification accuracy when compared to the full set of features. The BPSO feature selection technique also has similar or better performance in classification accuracy when compared to other widely used existing techniques.