Most benign breast tumors possess well-defined, sharp boundaries that delineate them from surrounding tissues, as opposed to malignant tumors. Computer techniques proposed to date for tumor analysis have concentrated on shape factors of tumor regions and texture measures. While shape measures based on contours of tumor regions can indicate differences in shape complexities between circumscribed and spiculated tumors, they are not designed to characterize the density variations across the boundary of a tumor. In this paper we propose a region-based measure of image edge profile acutance which characterizes the transition in density of a region of interest (ROI) along normals to the ROI at every boundary pixel. We investigate the potential of acutance in quantifying the sharpness of the boundaries of tumors, and propose its application to discriminate between benign and malignant mammographic tumors. In addition, we study the complementary use of various shape factors based upon the shape of the ROI, such as compactness, Fourier descriptors, moments, and chord-length statistics to distinguish between circumscribed and spiculated tumors. Thirty-nine images from the Mammographic Image Analysis Society (MIAS) database and an additional set of 15 local cases were selected for this study. The cases included 16 circumscribed benign, seven circumscribed malignant, 12 spiculated benign, and 19 spiculated malignant lesions. All diagnoses were proven by pathologic examinations of resected tissue. The contours of the lesions were first marked by an expert radiologist using X-Paint and X-Windows on a SUN-SPARCstation 2 Workstation. For computation of acutance, the ROI boundaries were iteratively approximated using a split/merge and end-point adjustment technique to obtain the best-fitting polygonal approximation. The jackknife method using the Mahalanobis distance measure in the BMDP (Biomedical Programs) package was used for classification of the lesions using acutance and the shape factors as features in various combinations. Acutance alone resulted in a benign/malignant classification accuracy of 95% the MIAS cases. Compactness alone gave a circumscribed/spiculated classification rate of 92.3% with the MIAS cases. Acutance in combination with a moment-based shape measure and a Fourier descriptor-based measure gave four-group classification rate of 95% with the MIAS cases. The results indicate the importance of including lesion edge definition with shape information for classification of tumors, and that the proposed measure of acutance fills this need.

The pectoral muscle represents a predominant density region in most medio-lateral oblique (MLO) views of mammograms; its inclusion can affect the results of intensity-based image processing methods or bias procedures in the detection of breast cancer. Local analysis of the pectoral muscle may be used to identify the presence of abnormal axillary lymph nodes, which may be the only manifestation of occult breast carcinoma. We propose a new method for the identification of the pectoral muscle in MLO mammograms based upon a multiresolution technique using Gabor wavelets. This new method overcomes the limitation of the straight-line representation considered in our initial investigation using the Hough transform. The method starts by convolving a group of Gabor filters, specially designed for enhancing the pectoral muscle edge, with the region of interest containing the pectoral muscle. After computing the magnitude and phase images using a vector-summation procedure, the magnitude value of each pixel is propagated in the direction of the phase. The resulting image is then used to detect the relevant edges. Finally, a post-processing stage is used to find the true pectoral muscle edge. The method was applied to 84 MLO mammograms from the Mini-MIAS (Mammographic Image Analysis Society, London, U.K.) database. Evaluation of the pectoral muscle edge detected in the mammograms was performed based upon the percentage of false-positive (FP) and false-negative (FN) pixels determined by comparison between the numbers of pixels enclosed in the regions delimited by the edges identified by a radiologist and by the proposed method. The average FP and FN rates were, respectively, 0.58% and 5.77%. Furthermore, the results of the Gabor-filter-based method indicated low Hausdorff distances with respect to the hand-drawn pectoral muscle edges, with the mean and standard deviation being 3.84 +/- 1.73 mm over 84 images.

The problem of computer-aided classification of benign and malignant breast masses using shape features is addressed. The aim of the study is to look at the exceptions in shapes of masses such as circumscribed malignant tumours and spiculated benign masses which are difficult to classify correctly using common shape analysis methods. The proposed methods of shape analysis treat the object's boundary in terms of local details. The boundaries of masses analysed using the proposed methods were manually drawn on mammographic images by an expert radiologist (JELD). A boundary segmentation method is used to separate major portions of the boundary and to label them as concave or convex segments. To analyse the shape information localised in each segment, features are computed through an iterative procedure for polygonal modelling of the mass boundaries. Features are based on the concavity fraction of a mass boundary and the degree of narrowness of spicules as characterised by a spiculation index. Two features comprising spiculation index (SI) and fractional concavity (fcc) developed in the present study when used in combination with the global shape feature of compactness resulted in a benign/malignant classification accuracy of 82%, with an area (Az) of 0.79 under the receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve with a database of the boundaries of 28 benign masses and 26 malignant tumours. SI alone resulted in a classification accuracy of 80% with Az of 0.82. The combination of all the three features achieved 91% accuracy of circumscribed versus spiculated classification of masses based on shape.

We propose a method for the detection of masses in mammographic images that employs Gaussian smoothing and sub-sampling operations as preprocessing steps. The mass portions are segmented by establishing intensity links from the central portions of masses into the surrounding areas. We introduce methods for analyzing oriented flow-like textural information in mammograms. Features based on flow orientation in adaptive ribbons of pixels across the margins of masses are proposed to classify the regions detected as true mass regions or false-positives (FPs). The methods yielded a mass versus normal tissue classification accuracy represented as an area (Az) of 0.87 under the receiver operating characteristics (ROCs) curve with a dataset of 56 images including 30 benign disease, 13 malignant disease, and 13 normal cases selected from the mini Mammographic Image Analysis Society database. A sensitivity of 81% was achieved at 2.2 FPs/image. Malignant tumor versus normal tissue classification resulted in a higher Az value of 0.9 under the ROC curve using only the 13 malignant and 13 normal cases with a sensitivity of 85% at 2.45 FPs/image. The mass detection algorithm could detect all the 13 malignant tumors successfully, but achieved a success rate of only 63% (19/30) in detecting the benign masses. The mass regions that were successfully segmented were further classified as benign or malignant disease by computing five texture features based on gray-level co-occurrence matrices (GCMs) and using the features in a logistic regression method. The features were computed using adaptive ribbons of pixels across the boundaries of the masses. Benign versus malignant classification using the GCM-based texture features resulted in Az = 0.79 with 19 benign and 13 malignant cases.

Vibroarthrographic (VAG) signals emitted by human knee joints are nonstationary and multicomponent in nature; time-frequency distributions (TFD's) provide powerful means to analyze such signals. The objective of this paper is to construct adaptive TFD's of VAG signals suitable for feature extraction. An adaptive TFD was constructed by minimum cross-entropy optimization of the TFD obtained by the matching pursuit decomposition algorithm. Parameters of VAG signals such as energy, energy spread, frequency, and frequency spread were extracted from their adaptive TFD's. The parameters carry information about the combined TF dynamics of the signals. The mean and standard deviation of the parameters were computed, and each VAG signal was represented by a set of just six features. Statistical pattern classification experiments based on logistic regression analysis of the parameters showed an overall normal/abnormal screening accuracy of 68.9% with 90 VAG signals (51 normals and 39 abnormals), and a higher accuracy of 77.5% with a database of 71 signals with 51 normals and 20 abnormals of a specific type of patellofemoral disorder. The proposed method of VAG signal analysis is independent of joint angle and clinical information, and shows good potential for noninvasive diagnosis and monitoring of patellofemoral disorders such as chondromalacia patella.

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A method for the identification of the breast boundary in mammograms is presented. The method can be used in the preprocessing stage of a system for computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) of breast cancer and also in the reduction of image file size in picture archiving and communication system applications. The method started with modification of the contrast of the original image. A binarisation procedure was then applied to the image, and the chain-code algorithm was used to find an approximate breast contour. Finally, the identification of the true breast boundary was performed by using the approximate contour as the input to an active contour model algorithm specially tailored for this purpose. After demarcation of the breast boundary, all artifacts outside the breast region were eliminated. The method was applied to 84 medio-lateral oblique mammograms from the Mini-MIAS database. Evaluation of the detected breast boundary was performed based upon the percentage of false-positive and false-negative pixels determined by a quantitative comparison between the contours identified by a radiologist and those identified by the proposed method. The average false positive and false negative rates were 0.41% and 0.58%, respectively. The two radiologists who evaluated the results considered the segmentation results to be acceptable for CAD purposes.

We propose a detection and classification system for the analysis of mammo-graphic calcifications. First, a new multi-tolerance region growing method is proposed for the detection of potential calcification regions and extraction of their contours. The method employs a distance metric computed on feature sets including measures of shape, centre of gravity, and size obtained for various growth tolerance values in order to determine the most suitable parameters. Then, shape features from moments, Fourier descriptors, and compactness are computed based upon the contours of the regions. Finally, a two-layer perceptron is utilized for the purpose of classification of calcifications with the shape features. A new leave-one-out algorithm-based parameter determination procedure is included in the neural network training step. In our preliminary study, detection rates were 81% and 85±3%, and correct classification rates were 94% and 87% with a test set of 58 benign calcifications and 241±10 malignant calcifications, respectively. The proposed system should provide considerable help to radiologists in the diagnosis of breast cancer.