Spatial correlation analysis of mammograms for detection of asymmetric findings

Abstract

We present a novel method to detect asymmetry in mammograms based upon bilateral analysis of the spatial distribution of density within paired mammographic strips. Various differential measures of spatial correlation of gray-scale values were computed with reference to the position of the nipple for a set of 128 pairs of mammograms from the Digital Database for Screening Mammography (DDSM). Features were selected by stepwise logistic regression and the leave-one-patient-out method was used for cross-validation of results. An area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.87 (SE=0.08) was achieved by using an artificial neural network classifier with radial basis functions. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.