Classification of mammogram images using the energy probability in frequency domain and most discriminative power coefficients

The purpose of this work is to develop a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system to assist radiologists in the classification of mammogram images. The CAD system is composed of three main steps. The first step is image preprocessing and segmentation with the seeded region growing algorithm applied on a localized triangular region to remove only the muscle. In the second step of the CAD system, we proposed a novel features extraction method, which consists of three stages. In the first, the discrete cosine transform (DCT) is applied on all obtained regions of interest and then only the upper left corner (ULC) of DCT coefficients is retained. Second, we have applied the energy probability to the ULCs that is used as a criterion for selecting discriminant information. At the last stage, a new Most Discriminative power coefficient algorithm has been proposed to select the most significant features. In the final step of the CAD, the support vector machines, Naive Bayes, and artificial neural network (ANN) classifiers are used to make an effective classification. The evaluation of the proposed algorithm on the mini-Mammographic Image Analysis Society database shows its efficiency over other recently proposed CAD systems in the literature, whereas an accuracy of 100% can be achieved using ANN with a small number of features.