Detection of Masses in Digital Mammograms using K-means and Support Vector Machine

Breast cancer is a serious public health problem in several countries. Computer Aided Detection/Diagnosis systems (CAD/CADx) have been used with relative success aiding health care professionals. The goal of such systems is contribute on the specialist task aiding in the detection of different types of cancer at an early stage. This work presents a methodology for masses detection on digitized mammograms using the K-means algorithm for image segmentation and co-occurrence matrix to describe the texture of segmented structures. Classification of these structures is accomplished through Support Vector Machines, which separate them in two groups, using shape and texture descriptors: masses and non-masses. The methodology obtained 85% of accuracy.