A textural approach for mass false positive reduction in mammography

During the last decade several algorithms have been proposed for automatic mass detection in mammographic images. However, almost all these methods suffer from a high number of false positives. In this paper we propose a new approach for tackling this false positive reduction problem. The key point of our proposal is the use of Local Binary Patterns (LBP) for representing the textural properties of the masses. We extend the basic LBP histogram descriptor into a spatially enhanced histogram which encodes both the local region appearance and the spatial structure of the masses. Support Vector Machines (SVM) are then used for classifying the true masses from the ones being actually normal parenchyma. Our approach is evaluated using 1792 ROIs extracted from the DDSM database. The experiments show that LBP are effective and efficient descriptors for mammographic masses. Moreover, the comparison with current methods illustrates that our proposal obtains a better performance. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.