Mass detection in digital mammograms using Gabor filter bank

Digital Mammograms are currently the most effective imaging modality for early detection of breast cancer but the number of false negatives and false positives is high. Mass is one type of breast lesion and the detection of masses is highly challenged problem. Almost all methods that have been proposed so far suffer from high number of false positives and false negatives. In this paper, a method for detecting true masses is presented, especially, for the reduction of false positives and false negatives. The key idea of the proposal is the use of Gabor filter banks for extracting the most representative and discriminative local spatial textural properties of masses that are present in mammograms at different orientations and scales. The system is evaluated on 512 (256 normal+256 true mass) regions of interests (ROIs) extracted from digital mammograms of DDSM database. We performed experiments with Gabor filter banks having different numbers of orientations and scales to find the best parameter setting. Using a powerful feature selection technique and support vector machines (SVM) with 10-fold cross validation, we report to achieve Az = 0.995±0.011, the area under ROC. Comparison with state-of-the-art techniques suggests that the proposed system outperforms similar methods, which are based on texture description, and the difference is statistically significant.