Intelligent detection and classification of micro-calcification in compressed mammogram image

Abstract

The main contribution of this article is introducing an intelligent classifier to distinguish between benign and malignant areas of micro-calcification in companded mammogram image which is not proved or addressed elsewhere. This method does not require any manual processing technique for classification, thus it can be assimilated for identifying benign and malignant areas in intelligent way. Moreover it gives good classification responses for compressed mammogram image. The goal of the proposed method is twofold: one is to preserve the details in Region of Interest (ROI) at low bit rate without affecting the diagnostic related information and second is to classify and segment the micro-calcification area in reconstructed mammogram image with high accuracy. The prime contribution of this work is that details of ROI and Non-ROI regions extracted using multi-wavelet transform are coded at variable bit rate using proposed Region Based Set Partitioning in Hierarchical Trees (RBSPIHT) before storing or transmitting the image. Image reconstructed during retrieval or at the receiving end is preprocessed to remove the channel noise and to enhance the diagnostic contrast information. Then the preprocessed image is classified as normal or abnormal (benign or malignant) using Probabilistic neural network. Segmentation of cancerous region is done using Fuzzy C-means Clustering (FCC) algorithm and the cancerous area is computed. The experimental result shows that the proposed model performance is good at achieving high sensitivity of 97.27%, specificity of 94.38% at an average compression rate and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) of 0.5bpp and 58dB respectively.