Fuzzy logic in digital mammography: analysis of lobulation

This paper illustrates how the fuzzy logic approach can be used to formalize the American College of Radiology (ACR) breast imaging reporting lexicon. In current practice radiologists make a relatively subjective determination for many terms from the lexicon related to breast cancer diagnosis. Lobulation and microlobulation of nodules are important features in breast cancer diagnosis based on mammographic analysis by using the ACR lexicon. We offer an approach for formalizing the distinction of these features and also formalize the description of the intermediate cases between lobulated and microlobulated masses. In this paper it is shown that fuzzy logic can be an effective tool in dealing with this kind of problems. The proposed formalization creates a base for the next two steps: (i) the automatic extraction of the related primitives from the image, and (ii) the detection of lobulated and microlobulated masses based on these primitives.