DIAGNOSIS OF BREAST LESIONS USING THE LOCAL CHAN-VESE MODEL, HIERARCHICAL FUZZY PARTITIONING AND FUZZY DECISION TREE INDUCTION

Abstract

Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of death among women. Mammography remains today the best technology to detect breast cancer, early and efficiently, to distinguish between benign and malignant diseases. Several techniques in image processing and analysis have been developed to address this problem. In this paper, we propose a new solution to the problem of computer aided detection and interpretation for breast cancer. In the proposed approach, a Local Chan-Vese (LCV) model is used for the mass lesion segmentation step to isolate a suspected abnormality in a mammogram. In the classification step, we propose a two-step process: firstly, we use the hierarchical fuzzy partitioning (HFP) to construct fuzzy partitions from data, instead of using the only human information, available from expert knowledge, which are not sufficiently accurate and confronted to errors or inconsistencies. Secondly,fuzzy decision tree induction are proposed to extract classification knowledge from a set of feature-based examples. Fuzzy decision trees are first used to determine the class of the abnormality detected (well-defined mass, ill-defined mass, architectural distortion, or speculated masses), then, to identify the Severity of the abnormality, which can be benign or malignant. The proposed system is tested by using the images from Mammographic Image Analysis Society[MIAS] database. Experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed approach, resulting in an accuracy rate of 87, a sensitivity of 82.14%, and good specificity of 91.42