Effect of GLCM Texture Features on the Medio-Lateral Oblique (MLO) View of Digital Mammograms for Breast Cancer Detection

Abstract

Breast cancer is one among the most common cancers in women. The early detection of breast cancer reduces the risk of death. Mammograms are an efficient breast imaging technique for breast cancer screening. Computer aided diagnosis (CAD) systems reduce manual errors and helps radiologists to analyze the mammogram images. The mammogram images are typically in two views, cranial-caudal (CC) and medio lateral oblique (MLO) views. MLO contains pectoral muscles (chest muscles) at the upper right or left corner of the image. In this study, it was removed by using a semi-automated method. All the normal and abnormal images were filtered and enhanced to improve the quality. GLCM (Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix) texture features were extracted and analyzed by changing the number of features in a feature set. Linear Support Vector Machine (LSVM) was used as classifier. The classification accuracy was improved as the number of features in GLCM feature set increases. Simulation results show an overall classification accuracy of 96.7% with 19 GLCM features using SVM classifiers.