An artificial intelligent algorithm for tumor detection in screening mammogram

Cancerous tumor mass is one of the major types of breast cancer. When cancerous masses are embedded in and camouflaged by varying densities of parenchymal tissue structures, they are very difficult to be visually detected on mammograms. This paper presents an algorithm that combines several artificial intelligent techniques with the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) for detection of masses in mammograms. The AI techniques include fractal dimension analysis, multiresolution Markov random field, dogs-and-rabbits algorithm, and others. The fractal dimension analysis serves as a preprocessor to determine the approximate locations of the regions suspicious for cancer in the mammogram. The dogs-and-rabbits clustering algorithm is used to initiate the segmentation at the LL subband of a three-level DWT decomposition of the mammogram. A tree-type classification strategy is applied at the end to determine whether a given region is suspicious for cancer. The authors have verified the algorithm with 322 mammograms in the Mammographic Image Analysis Society Database. The verification results show that the proposed algorithm has a sensitivity of 97.3% and the number of false positives per image is 3.92.