Introducing Kernel Based Morphology as an Enhancement Method for Mass Classification on Mammography

Since mammography images are in low-contrast, applying enhancement techniques as a pre-processing step are wisely recommended in the classification of the abnormal lesions into benign or malignant. A new kind of structural enhancement is proposed by morphological operator, which introduces an optimal Gaussian Kernel primitive, the kernel parameters are optimized the use of Genetic Algorithm. We also take the advantages of optical density (OD) images to promote the diagnosis rate. The proposed enhancement method is applied on both the gray level (GL) images and their OD values respectively, as a result morphological patterns get bolder on GL images; then, local binary patterns are extracted from this kind of images. Applying the enhancement method on OD images causes more differences between the values therefore a threshold method is applied toremove some background pixels. Those pixels that are more eligible to be mass are remained, and some statistical texture features are extracted from their equivalent GL images. Support vector machine is used for both approaches and the final decision is made by combining these two classifiers. The classification performance rate is evaluated by Az, under the receiver operating characteristic curve. The designed method yields Az = 0.9231, which demonstrates good results.