COMPUTER AIDED DIAGNOSIS SYSTEM FOR AUTOMATIC TWO STAGES CLASSIFICATION OF BREAST MASS IN DIGITAL MAMMOGRAM IMAGES

Breast cancer is the most frequent cancer type that is diagnosed in women. The exact causes of such cancer are still unknown. Early and precise detection of breast cancer using mammogram images or biopsy to provide the required medications can increase the healing percentage. There are much current research efforts to developed a computer aided diagnosis (CAD) system based on mammogram images for detecting and classification of breast masses. In this research, a CAD system is developed for automated segmentation and two-stages classification of breast masses. The first stage includes the classification of the masses into seven classes (normal, calcification, circumscribed, spiculated, ill-defined, architectural distortion, asymmetry), which is done using probabilistic neural network (PNN). The second classification stage is to define the severity of abnormality into two classes (Benign and Malignant) which were done using support vector machine (SVM). The results of applying the proposed method on two mammogram image show that the accuracy of detection and segmentation of the breast mass was 99.8% for mammographic image analysis society database (MIAS-DB) with 322 images and 97.5% for breast cancer digital repository (BCDR), BCDR-F03 and BCDR-DN01 with 936 images, while for the first classification stage has accuracy of 97.08%, sensitivity of 98.30% and specificity of 89.8%, and the second classification stage has an accuracy of 99.18%, sensitivity of 98.42% and specificity of 94.90%.