An Efficient Breast Cancer Detection Framework for Medical Diagnosis Applications

Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer, and it is the reason for cancer death toll in women in recent years. Early diagnosis is essential to handle breast cancer patients for treatment at the right time. Screening with mammography is the preferred examination for breast cancer, as it is available worldwide and inexpensive. Computer-Aided Detection (CAD) systems are used to analyze medical images to detect breast cancer, early. The death rate of cancer patients has decreased by detecting tumors early and having appropriate treatment after operations. Processing of mammogram images has four main steps: pre-processing, segmentation of the region of interest, feature extraction and classification of the images into normal or abnormal classes. This paper presents an efficient framework for processing of mammogram images and introduces an algorithm for segmentation of the images to detect masses. The pre-processing step of mammogram images includes removal of digitization noise using a 2D median filter, removal of artifacts using morphological operations, and contrast enhancement using a fuzzy enhancement technique. The proposed fuzzy image enhancement technique is analyzed and compared with conventional techniques based on an Enhancement Measure (EME) and local contrast metrics. The comparison shows an outstanding performance of the proposed technique from the visual and numerical perspectives. The segmentation process is performed using Otsu's multiple thresholding method. This method segments the image regions into five classes with variable intensities using four thresholds. Its effectiveness is measured based on visual quality of the segmentation output, as it gives details about the image and positions of masses. The performance of the proposed framework is measured using Dice coefficient, Hausdorff, and Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) metrics. The segmented tumor region with the proposed segmentation method is 81% of the ground truth region provided by an expert. Hence, the proposed framework achieves promising results for aiding radiologists in screening of mammograms, accurately.