We propose a method for discrimination and classification of mammograms with benign, malignant and normal tissues using independent component analysis and neural networks. The method was tested for a mammogram set from MIAS database, and multilayer perceptron neural networks, probabilistic neural networks and radial basis function neural networks. The best performance was obtained with probabilistic neural networks, resulting in 97.3% success rate, with 100% of specificity and 96% of sensitivity.

BackgroundFemale breast cancer is the major cause of death by cancer in western countries. Efforts in Computer Vision have been made in order to improve the diagnostic accuracy by radiologists. Some methods of lesion diagnosis in mammogram images were developed based in the technique of principal component analysis which has been used in efficient coding of signals and 2D Gabor wavelets used for computer vision applications and modeling biological vision.MethodsIn this work, we present a methodology that uses efficient coding along with linear discriminant analysis to distinguish between mass and non-mass from 5090 region of interest from mammograms.ResultsThe results show that the best rates of success reached with Gabor wavelets and principal component analysis were 85.28% and 87.28%, respectively. In comparison, the model of efficient coding presented here reached up to 90.07%.ConclusionsAltogether, the results presented demonstrate that independent component analysis performed successfully the efficient coding in order to discriminate mass from non-mass tissues. In addition, we have observed that LDA with ICA bases showed high predictive performance for some datasets and thus provide significant support for a more detailed clinical investigation.

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The proposed method showed a good classification rate. The method will be useful for early cancer diagnosis.