The power laws: Zipf and inverse Zipf for automated segmentation and classification of masses within mammograms

Breast cancer is becoming the leading form of cancer among women worldwide, indeed, there are no effective ways to prevent this disease at present, therefore, it’s early screening and detection is the key to rise the success of treatment, hence, the reduce of the associated mortality rates. This work aims to improve the performance of the current computer-aided detection and diagnosis approaches (CADe/CADx) of breast cancer which involve the application of the computer technology in mammograms analysis and understanding; for this purpose, we deal with the power laws: Zipf and inverse Zipf. The originality of this research lays in the contribution of the power laws for mammograms analysis; it is the first attempt to use them in the field of mammograms masses segmentation and classification, indeed, these laws characterize the structural complexity of texture within mammograms and provide the curves of Zipf and inverse Zipf which carry significant information that could be used to mammograms masses detection and classification along a new set of textural features extracted from the curves of Zipf and inverse Zipf. According to our experiments conducted on a mammogram database used in the framework of a bilateral project between our university and the hospital CHU at Algeria, we can assert that our approach based Zipf’s and inverse Zipf’s laws is a powerful and efficient approach for automated mammograms masses detection and classification.