Mammographic Mass Detection with Statistical Region Merging

An automatic method for detection of mammographic masses is presented which utilizes statistical region merging for segmentation (SRM) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) for classification. The performance of the scheme was evaluated on 36 images selected from the local database of mammograms and on 48 images taken from the Digital Database for Screening Mammography (DDSM). The Az value (area under the ROC curve) for classifying each region was 0.90 for the local dataset and 0.96 for the images from DDSM. Results indicate that SRM segmentation can form part of an robust and efficient basis for analysis of mammograms.