디지털 마모그램 반자동 종괴검출 방법

Abstract

Mammogram is one of the important techniques for mass detection, which is the early diagnosis stage of a breast cancer. Especially, the CAD(Computer Aided Diagnosis) using mammogram improves the working performance of radiologists as it offers an effective mass detection. There are two types of CAD systems using mammogram; automatic and semi-automatic CAD systems. However, the automatic segmentation is limited in performance due to the difficulty of obtaining an accurate segmentation since mass occurs in the dense areas of the breast tissue and has smoother boundaries. Semi-automatic CAD systems overcome these limitations, however, they also have problems including high FP (False Positive) rate and a large amount of training data required for training a classifier. The proposed system which overcomes the aforementioned problems to detect mass is composed of the suspected area selection, the level set segmentation and SVM (Support Vector Machine) classification. To assess the efficacy of the system, 60 test images from the FFDM (Full-Field Digital Mammography) are analyzed and compared with the previous semi-automatic system, which uses the ANN classifier. The experimental results of the proposed system indicate higher accuracy of detecting mass in comparison to the previous systems.