WDO optimized detection for mammographic masses and its diagnosis: A unified CAD system

Abstract For decades, breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths among women. Early detection and diagnosis of breast cancer can effectively reduce the mortality rate. Masses are one of the manifestations of imperceptible breast cancer visible in mammograms whose detection and diagnosis is a challenging task due to its subtle nature. In this paper, a unified computer-aided detection/diagnosis scheme is proposed for the automatic detection and diagnosis of mammographic masses. Being simple and effective, multilevel image thresholding based on Otsu’s method is considered for localization of suspicious mass lesions, but its performance is compromised while defining the precise threshold value especially when the intensity profile in and around the anomalies does not vary much. To mitigate the issue, a nature-inspired optimization algorithm, wind driven optimization, is proposed which in combination with Otsu’s multilevel thresholding identifies the potential candidates of mass lesions. To reduce the false positives and diagnose the malignant masses, a texture-based multi-gradient local quinary pattern (M-GQP) feature is introduced which renders higher consistency in computing gradient information from the uniform and near-uniform areas. Due to eight distinct Sobel masks, it offers a better resolution in edge regions in addition to the micro information at different orientations. Four popular classifiers (support vector machine, Fisher’s linear discriminant, K-nearest neighbor, and an ensemble classifier) are also investigated to discriminate malignant tumors from benign lesions and normal tissues. The proposed integrated approach for the detection and characterization of mammographic masses is evaluated on two benchmark databases — mini-MIAS and DDSM comprising of 68 and 500 mammograms, respectively and achieved a sensitivity of 96.9% and 96.2% with 0.09 and 0.17 false positives per image after false positive reduction for the respective datasets. The diagnosis of malignant masses prior to and following false-positive reduction observes an A z value of 0.98 and 0.94 with an accuracy of 99.04% and 92.65%, respectively for the mini-MIAS dataset while the same for the DDSM are 0.99 and 0.92 with an accuracy of 98.33% and 78.50%, respectively. In a three-class classification (normal, benign and malignant), an accuracy of 99.04% and 97.76% with an F 1 score of 0.98 and 0.97 for malignancy is obtained for the mini-MIAS and DDSM images, respectively which are promising in nature when compared to other competing schemes in the state-of-the-art.