A mammographic mass CAD system incorporating features from shape, fractal, and channelized Hotelling observer measurements: preliminary results

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Abstract
In this paper, we present preliminary results from a highly sensitive and specific CAD system for mammographic masses. For false positive reduction, the system incorporated features derived from shape, fractal, and channelized Hotelling observer (CHO) measurements. The database for this study consisted of 80 craniocaudal mammograms randomly extracted from USF's digital database for screening mammography. The database contained 49 mass findings (24 malignant, 25 benign). To detect initial mass candidates, a difference of Gaussians (DOG) filter was applied through normalized cross correlation. Suspicious regions were localized in the filtered images via multi-level thresholding. Features extracted from the regions included shape, fractal dimension, and the output from a Laguerre-Gauss (LG) CHO. Influential features were identified via feature selection techniques. The regions were classified with a linear classifier using leave-one-out training/testing. The DOG filter achieved a sensitivity of 88% (23/24 malignant, 20/25 benign). Using the selected features, the false positives per image dropped from ~20 to ~5 with no loss in sensitivity. This preliminary investigation of combining multi-level thresholded DOG-filtered images with shape, fractal, and LG-CHO features shows great promise as a mass detector. Future work will include the addition of more texture and mass-boundary descriptive features as well as further exploration of the LG-CHO.

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