Shape-based tumor retrieval in mammograms using relevance-feedback techniques

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental "morphological analysis" retrieval system for mammograms, using Relevance-Feedback techniques. The features adopted are first-order statistics of the Normalized Radial Distance, extracted from the annotated mass boundary. The system is evaluated on an extensive dataset of 2274 masses of the DDSM database, which involves 7 distinct classes. The experiments verify that the involvement of the radiologist as part of the retrieval process improves the results, even for such a hard classification task, reaching the precision rate of almost 90%. Therefore, Relevance-Feedback can be employed as a very useful complementary tool to a Computer Aided Diagnosis system. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.