Multimed Tools Appl

DOI 10.1007/s11042-016-4161-0

Wavelet energy entropy and linear regression classifier

for detecting abnormal breasts

Yi Chen 1,2,3 & Yin Zhang 4 & Hui-Min Lu 5 &

Xian-Qing Chen 6,7 & Jian-Wu Li 8 & Shui-Hua Wang 1,9

Received: 25 August 2016 / Revised: 21 October 2016 / Accepted: 14 November 2016

# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016

Abstract Breast abnormalities are the early symptoms of breast cancers. They may also bring
in psychoemotional stresses to women. In this study, we developed a new automatic program
based on wavelet energy entropy (WEE) and linear regression classifier (LRC): First, we
segment region of interest from mammogram images. Second, we calculate WEE from the
segmented images. Third, LRC was used as the classifier. We named our method as “WEE +
LRC”. The experiment used 10-fold stratified cross validation that was repeated 10 times. The
statistical results showed the classification result was the best when the decomposition level
was 4, with a sensitivity of 92.00 ± 3.20%, a specificity of 91.70 ± 3.27%, and an accuracy of
91.85 ± 2.21%. The proposed method was superior to other five state-of-the-art methods. In all,
our method is effective in detecting abnormal breasts.

* Shui-Hua Wang
wangshuihua@njnu.edu.cn

1
School of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing Normal University, 1 Wenyuan, Nanjing,
Jiangsu 210023, China
2
Hunan Provincial Key Laboratory of Network Investigational Technology, Hunan Policy Academy,
Changsha, Hunan 410138, China
3
Key Laboratory of Image and Video Understanding for Social Safety, Nanjing University of Science
and Technology, Nanjing 210094, China
4
School of Information and Safety Engineering, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Wuhan,
Hubei 430073, China
5
Department of Mechanical and Control Engineering, Kyushu Institute of Technology, Fukuoka
Prefecture 804-8550, Japan
6
Department of electrical engineering, College of engineering, Zhejiang Normal University, Jinhua,
Zhejiang 321004, China
7
Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA
8
School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China
9
Department of Electrical Engineering, The City College of New York, CUNY, New York, NY 10031,
USA
 Multimed Tools Appl

Keywords Breast abnormality . Digital mammography . Wavelet energy entropy . Linear

regression classifier . Least-squares estimation

1 Introduction

Breast abnormalities [20, 39] may attribute to genetic [29, 59], infectious [9], environmental [45] or
developmental [27] factors. Not all abnormalities are harmful, nevertheless, some may pose a health
hazard [18]. For example, the breast irregularities do not pose any physical threat, but it may yield to
ongoing psychoemotional stress [3, 11, 19] relating to negative body image issues.
Biopsy [15, 33, 40] is the most accurate detection technique but is not practical. Digital
mammography (DM) [10, 42] is one of the easiest approaches for detecting abnormal breasts.
DM uses a digital receptor to monitor breast tissues, and the observers then check the results on the
screen displays [43]. The dense breast tissue, which appear white as breast masses or tumors over
DM images, may affect the radiological check [53]. In contrast, fatty tissues appear black [48].
This causes less accuracy in women with dense breasts. Scholars now are developing automatic
abnormal breast detection systems: Mojra (2009) [32] used finite element method (FEM) to detect
abnormal masses in a real breast model. Gorgel (2015) [12] introduced in the spherical wavelet
transform (SWT), and chose support vector machine (SVM) as classifier. Jeon (2014) [17] used
augmenting abnormal lump to detect breast tumors. Phillips (2014) [37] utilized point-of-care test.
Yang (2015) [51] employed the maximum intensity projection (MIP) and thin-plate spline (TPS)
methods in order to identify breast cancer. Milosevic (2015) [31] used spatial gray level dependence
(SGLD) matrix and gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) to detect abnormal breasts. Abdel-
Nasser(2015)[2]usedauniformlocal directionalpatternto analyzeabnormal tissueandbreast density.
Liu (2016) [23] employed weighted-type fractional Fourier transform (WFRFT) and PCA. They used
k-nearest neighbors (kNN) and SVM algorithms. Wu (2016) [49] suggested to use fractional Fourier
entropy (FRFE) and four algorithms: genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO),
biogeography-based optimization (BBO), and chaotic adaptive real-coded BBO (CAR-BBO).
Those above papers pioneered the use of computer vision and artificial intelligence [4, 7]
techniques in abnormal breast detection. Nevertheless, they also have several common disadvantages:
First, their performances are not satisfying and can be improved further. Second, most of them did not
run the experiments in strict statistical setting, Third, the hyper-parameters were set ad arbitrium.
To solve above issues, we first introduced a new image feature—wavelet energy entropy (WEE),
which is capable of representing the energy information in signals or systems. Besides, we
introduced a classical and powerful linear regression classifier (LRC). Third, we used a 10x10-
fold cross validation, which reported both average and standard deviation. Fourth, we present an
experiment as how to select the value of the hyper-parameter (the optimal decomposition level). The
structure of the remainder is organized as follows: Section 2 gives the materials and methods.
Section 3 gives the results and discussions. Section 4 concludes the paper.

2 Methodology

2.1 Region of interest

In this procedure, we aimed to extract the region of interest (ROI) part, following the five steps
described in reference [23] shown in Fig. 1.
Multimed Tools Appl

In Step A, a median filter [30, 54] with 3x3 window was applied to remove additive noise
[57].
In Step B, we utilized a homomorphic filtering [50] in order to remove multiplicative noise
[26]. Suppose a(s) represents the original breast DM image, then the denoised image b(s) can
be expressed as


bðsÞ ¼ exp Y −1 ½X ðY fln½aðsÞgÞ ð1Þ

where s and u represent the spatial domain and the frequency domain, respectively; Y the
discrete Fourier transform; Y−1 the inverse discrete Fourier transform.
The filter function X is defined [6] with the form of:
( "   #)
AðuÞ 2
X ðuÞ ¼ ðcH −cL Þ 1−exp −n  þ cL ð2Þ
A0

where n represents the slope parameter; A(u) is the distance from origin to point (u), A0 a given
distance; cL and cH were defined by experiences as 0.5 and 2, respectively. Figure 2 shows the
flowchart of homomorphic filter.
In Step C, the image enhancement was performed in spatial domain. The logarithmic
enhancement [56] was used to shrinks the wide range of high-level grayscale regions, and
meanwhile expand the narrow range of low-level grayscale regions [47].
In Step D, we removed the background by region-growing method [46], which selects
several initial seed points, and then compares them with their neighboring pixels [16]. The
neighboring pixels are put into the cluster containing the seed points, if the similarity criterion
is satisfied. This process is looped until all pixels are assigned [21].

Fig. 1 Diagram of Preprocessing Mammogram Image

Step A Remove Additive Noise

Step B Remove Multiplicative Noise

Step C Image Enhancement

Step D Remove Background

Step E Remove Pectoral Muscle

ROI extraction
 Multimed Tools Appl

ln Y X Y-1 exp
a(s) z(s) Z(u) O(u) o(s) b(s)

Fig. 2 Pipeline of homomorphic filter (z, Z, O, and o are temporary variables)

In Step E, pectoral muscle was removed based on a simple thresholding technique

[28]. The threshold value was obtained by experience. After the five steps, the region
of interest (ROI) was segmented from the breast DM image.

2.2 Wavelet energy entropy

The wavelet energy entropy (WEE) [14, 24] is defined as the Shannon entropy of the
energy of wavelet coefficients [52]. Suppose the wavelet coefficient of a signal (or an
image) at decomposition level j and translation k is C(j,k), then the energy signal
E(j,k) is defined as the squared value of
 
 
E ð j; k Þ ¼ C ð j; k Þ2 ð3Þ

Fig. 3 Diagram of WEE

Breast DM Image
DWT

C(j,k)

Squared

E(j,k)

Entropy

WEE(j)
Multimed Tools Appl

Then, the WEE at level j is defined as the Shannon entropy of the energy coefficients E(j,k)
with the form of
WEEð jÞ ¼ entropy ðE Þ ð4Þ
k

Figure 3 shows the diagram of calculating WEE. A problem exists as how to find
the optimal decomposition level j. In this study, we set j to the range of 1–5 and
determine the optimal value.
The WEE is expected to give better results than individual wavelet energy or
wavelet entropy, since it combines the advantages of both algorithms. In below, we
shall design an experiment and validate our hypothesis.

2.3 Linear regression classifier

The linear regression based classification method utilizes linear regression to measure
the distance from a sample to a specific class. Suppose the samples from the same
class lie on a linear subspace. We can represent a sample by the linear combinations
of its intra-class sample, where linear regression is used to calculate the reconstruction
error (the distance from a sample to a specific class). For a sample from an unknown
class, we calculate the reconstruction error of each class. The label of the sample will
be assigned as the class with the smallest reconstruction error.
Linear regression classifier (LRC) is a classical classification method [34, 44].
Assume there is a dataset X = [X1, X2,…, Xm]. Here m represents the number of
classes. Suppose samples from a specific class lie on a linear subspace. Hence, a

Fig. 4 Block diagram of our

method
Mammogram Image

ROI Extraction

WEE Calculation

LRC
 Multimed Tools Appl

(a) CIR (b) ASY (c) ARD

(d) CAL (e) ILL (f) SPI

Fig. 5 Six abnormal breasts. (CIR = circumscribed mass; ASY = asymmetry; ARD = architectural distortion;
CAL = calcification; ILL = ill-defined mass; SPI = spiculated mass)

breast DM image ti from the i-th class can be expressed as a combination of the
samples from the same class Xi.
ti ¼ X i d i ð5Þ
where di is the reconstruction coefficients, which can be calculated from the least-
squares estimation (LSE) [5]:
 −1
d^i ¼ X Ti X i X Ti ti ð6Þ

Fig. 6 A normal breast

Multimed Tools Appl

(a) fatty (b) dense-glandular (c) fatty-glandular

Fig. 7 Three types of background tissue

Then the breast DM image ti is reconstructed as:

^ti ¼ X i d^i ð7Þ

The reconstruction error ri of the i-th class is used to estimate the similarity between the
breast DM image and the i-th class [41], which is defined as follows.

ri ¼ ti −^ti ¼ ti −X i d^i ð8Þ

For an unknown breast DM image p, we employ all the m class model to computer the
reconstruction error. Finally, the label of the test breast image p is assigned as:
2

labelðpÞ ¼ min p−X i d^i ð9Þ
i

2.4 Implementation

Combining the three successful components: (i) ROI extraction; (ii) WEE calculation; and (iii)
LRC. We can draw the block diagram of our proposed method as shown in Fig. 4.
Our statistical results were obtained in 10*10-fold stratified cross validation [8, 35].
The stratification guarantees that each fold contains 10 abnormal breast DM images
and 10 normal breast DM images. The stratified cross validation was randomly set at
every run.

Fig. 8 Illustration of ROI

extraction

(a) Original Image (b) ROI extraction

Table 1 Statistical of proposed method (j = 1)

F1 F2 F3 F4 F5 F6 F7 F8 F9 F10 Total Acc.

R1 10 + 9 9+8 8+7 8+9 9+9 9+8 9+8 6 + 10 9 + 10 9 + 10 86 + 88 87.00%

=19 =17 =15 =17 =18 =17 =17 =16 =19 =19 =174
R2 6+7 7+6 10 + 9 10 + 8 8+8 9+6 5+9 7+6 8 + 10 9+8 79 + 77 78.00%
=13 =13 =19 =18 =16 =15 =14 =13 =18 =17 =156
R3 6+7 6 + 10 9+7 10 + 9 10 + 8 9 + 10 8 + 10 8+9 8+7 9+9 83 + 86 84.50%
=13 =16 =16 =19 =18 =19 =18 =17 =15 =18 =169
R4 10 + 9 10 + 9 6+8 7+7 9+8 9 + 10 10 + 9 10 + 6 8 + 10 7 + 10 86 + 86 86.00%
=19 =19 =14 =14 =17 =19 =19 =16 =18 =17 =172
R5 9+6 9+9 8+8 9+8 10 + 8 8 + 10 8+8 8+9 10 + 7 7+9 86 + 82 84.00%
=15 =18 =16 =17 =18 =18 =16 =17 =17 =16 =168
R6 10 + 9 10 + 6 7+8 9+8 10 + 8 9+8 9+7 9+9 9+7 9+7 91 + 77 84.00%
=19 =16 =15 =17 =18 =17 =16 =18 =16 =16 =168
R7 7 + 10 9+8 9+9 10 + 9 9+8 8+9 10 + 10 5+7 8+7 10 + 10 85 + 87 86.00%
=17 =17 =18 =19 =17 =17 =20 =12 =15 =20 =172
R8 9+8 9+6 10 + 8 6+9 10 + 10 7+6 10 + 10 7 + 10 8+9 7+6 83 + 82 82.50%
=17 =15 =18 =15 =20 =13 =20 =17 =17 =13 =165
R9 9 + 10 10 + 10 9+9 7+9 8+9 10 + 6 9 + 10 8+9 8+9 10 + 9 88 + 90 89.00%
=19 =20 =18 =16 =17 =16 =19 =17 =17 =19 =178
R10 7 + 10 10 + 10 6 + 10 9+8 10 + 9 8+9 9+6 9 + 10 10 + 9 7+8 85 + 89 87.00%
=17 =20 =16 =17 =19 =17 =15 =19 =19 =15 =174
Total 852 + 844 84.80
=1696 ±3.04%
Multimed Tools Appl
Table 2 Statistical of proposed method (j = 2)

F1 F2 F3 F4 F5 F6 F7 F8 F9 F10 Total Acc.

Multimed Tools Appl

R1 9+9 10 + 10 10 + 10 9+8 10 + 9 8+9 10 + 9 8 + 10 10 + 9 10 + 9 94 + 92 93.00%

=18 =20 =20 =17 =19 =17 =19 =18 =19 =19 =186
R2 9 + 10 8+9 9+9 8 + 10 10 + 10 10 + 8 9+9 9+9 9+6 9+9 90 + 89 89.50%
=19 =17 =18 =18 =20 =18 =18 =18 =15 =18 =179
R3 9+8 9 + 10 10 + 9 8+6 7 + 10 9+9 8+7 9+8 8+9 9+9 86 + 85 85.50%
=17 =19 =19 =14 =17 =18 =15 =17 =17 =18 =171
R4 10 + 9 8+8 8+8 9+9 8 + 10 10 + 8 9 + 10 9+8 9+9 9+8 89 + 87 88.00%
=19 =16 =16 =18 =18 =18 =19 =17 =18 =17 =176
R5 9 + 10 10 + 8 8 + 10 10 + 8 9+9 9+7 8+9 10 + 10 9+9 10 + 9 92 + 89 90.50%
=19 =18 =18 =18 =18 =16 =17 =20 =18 =19 =181
R6 8 + 10 10 + 8 8+9 9+8 6 + 10 9+8 10 + 9 8 + 10 8+9 6+8 82 + 89 85.50%
=18 =18 =17 =17 =16 =17 =19 =18 =17 =14 =171
R7 9 + 10 10 + 10 9+9 9+9 10 + 10 9+9 8+9 8+8 9+9 10 + 8 91 + 91 91.00%
=19 =20 =18 =18 =20 =18 =17 =16 =18 =18 =182
R8 10 + 9 8+9 8+9 9 + 10 8 + 10 10 + 10 10 + 9 8+8 10 + 9 8 + 10 89 + 93 91.00%
=19 =17 =17 =19 =18 =20 =19 =16 =19 =18 =182
R9 8+9 8+9 9+9 9+9 10 + 9 8 + 10 8+8 8+8 9+8 7 + 10 84 + 89 86.50%
=17 =17 =18 =18 =19 =18 =16 =16 =17 =17 =173
R10 9+9 9 + 10 9+8 8 + 10 9+8 10 + 10 9+6 10 + 6 10 + 10 9+9 92 + 86 89.00%
=18 =19 =17 =18 =17 =20 =15 =16 =20 =18 =178
Total 889 + 890 88.95
=1779 ±2.54%
Table 3 Statistical of proposed method (j = 3)

F1 F2 F3 F4 F5 F6 F7 F8 F9 F10 Total Acc.

R1 10 + 10 10 + 9 9+7 8 + 10 9 + 10 9 + 10 9 + 10 8+8 9 + 10 10 + 9 91 + 93 92.00%

=20 =19 =16 =18 =19 =19 =19 =16 =19 =19 =184
R2 7+8 7+9 10 + 10 10 + 10 9+8 10 + 9 8+7 7 + 10 9+9 10 + 8 87 + 88 87.50%
=15 =16 =20 =20 =17 =19 =15 =17 =18 =18 =175
R3 8+7 6 + 10 9+9 10 + 10 10 + 8 10 + 9 10 + 8 9+9 8 + 10 9 + 10 89 + 90 89.50%
=15 =16 =18 =20 =18 =19 =18 =18 =18 =19 =179
R4 10 + 10 10 + 10 8+8 9+8 9 + 10 9 + 10 10 + 10 10 + 9 9+9 7 + 10 91 + 94 92.50%
=20 =20 =16 =17 =19 =19 =20 =19 =18 =17 =185
R5 9 + 10 9 + 10 8+8 10 + 8 10 + 10 8 + 10 8 + 10 10 + 7 10 + 10 8+9 90 + 92 91.00%
=19 =19 =16 =18 =20 =18 =18 =17 =20 =17 =182
R6 10 + 10 10 + 10 9+8 10 + 8 10 + 10 10 + 7 9+8 9 + 10 9 + 10 9+8 95 + 89 92.00%
=20 =20 =17 =18 =20 =17 =17 =19 =19 =17 =184
R7 9+8 9 + 10 9 + 10 10 + 9 9+9 9+8 10 + 10 7+7 8 + 10 10 + 10 90 + 91 90.50%
=17 =19 =19 =19 =18 =17 =20 =14 =18 =20 =181
R8 10 + 9 9+9 10 + 9 6 + 10 10 + 10 9+6 10 + 10 8+9 9+8 8+8 89 + 88 88.50%
=19 =18 =19 =16 =20 =15 =20 =17 =17 =16 =177
R9 9 + 10 10 + 10 10 + 9 7+9 9+9 10 + 9 10 + 9 10 + 7 8 + 10 10 + 10 93 + 92 92.50%
=19 =20 =19 =16 =18 =19 =19 =17 =18 =20 =185
R10 9+8 9 + 10 6 + 10 9 + 10 10 + 10 9+9 9 + 10 10 + 9 10 + 10 10 + 6 91 + 92 91.50%
=17 =19 =16 =19 =20 =18 =19 =19 =20 =16 =183
Total 906 + 909 90.75
=1815 ±1.74%
Multimed Tools Appl
Table 4 Statistical of proposed method (j = 4)

F1 F2 F3 F4 F5 F6 F7 F8 F9 F10 Total Acc.

Multimed Tools Appl

R1 10 + 10 8+8 9+9 10 + 9 8+7 9+8 9+9 10 + 9 9 + 10 10 + 9 92 + 88 90.00%

=20 =16 =18 =19 =15 =17 =18 =19 =19 =19 =180
R2 9+8 10 + 8 9+8 9+7 9+9 9+7 10 + 9 10 + 10 8 + 10 10 + 9 93 + 85 89.00%
=17 =18 =17 =16 =18 =16 =19 =20 =18 =19 =178
R3 10 + 10 10 + 8 10 + 8 10 + 10 9 + 10 10 + 8 10 + 10 8+9 9 + 10 10 + 10 96 + 93 94.50%
=20 =18 =18 =20 =19 =18 =20 =17 =19 =20 =189
R4 10 + 9 10 + 10 9 + 10 7+9 8+9 9 + 10 10 + 8 9 + 10 10 + 9 9 + 10 91 + 94 92.50%
=19 =20 =19 =16 =17 =19 =18 =19 =19 =19 =185
R5 10 + 10 10 + 9 9+9 10 + 9 8 + 10 10 + 9 8 + 10 8+9 9+9 8 + 10 90 + 94 92.00%
=20 =19 =18 =19 =18 =19 =18 =17 =18 =18 =184
R6 10 + 9 10 + 10 10 + 8 8+9 9+9 7+8 8 + 10 10 + 8 10 + 9 10 + 9 92 + 89 90.50%
=19 =20 =18 =17 =18 =15 =18 =18 =19 =19 =181
R7 9 + 10 10 + 10 9+9 10 + 9 9+9 9+7 8 + 10 10 + 10 8 + 10 9 + 10 91 + 94 92.50%
=19 =20 =18 =19 =18 =16 =18 =20 =18 =19 =185
R8 10 + 9 10 + 10 10 + 9 9 + 10 9 + 10 9+9 10 + 8 9 + 10 10 + 10 10 + 10 96 + 95 95.50%
=19 =20 =19 =19 =19 =18 =18 =19 =20 =20 =191
R9 8 + 10 10 + 10 9 + 10 8 + 10 10 + 6 8 + 10 9+9 7+9 9 + 10 7+9 85 + 93 89.00%
=18 =20 =19 =18 =16 =18 =18 =16 =19 =16 =178
R10 10 + 9 10 + 10 10 + 9 10 + 10 10 + 9 7+9 10 + 9 9+9 8 + 10 10 + 8 94 + 92 93.00%
=19 =20 =19 =20 =19 =16 =19 =18 =18 =18 =186
Total 920 + 917 91.85
=1837 ±2.21%
Table 5 Statistical of proposed method (j = 5)

F1 F2 F3 F4 F5 F6 F7 F8 F9 F10 Total Acc.

R1 9+7 9+7 10 + 8 8+8 9+9 9 + 10 9 + 10 10 + 7 9+9 10 + 9 92 + 84 88.00%

=16 =16 =18 =16 =18 =19 =19 =17 =18 =19 =176
R2 7 + 10 9+8 9 + 10 9+9 9 + 10 10 + 10 8+9 8+9 10 + 10 8 + 10 87 + 95 91.00%
=17 =17 =19 =18 =19 =20 =17 =17 =20 =18 =182
R3 10 + 8 9 + 10 8+7 10 + 8 9+8 8 + 10 9 + 10 10 + 9 9 + 10 10 + 9 92 + 89 90.50%
=18 =19 =15 =18 =17 =18 =19 =19 =19 =19 =181
R4 9 + 10 10 + 9 9+7 10 + 10 8+9 9+7 10 + 9 10 + 8 9+9 9+9 93 + 87 90.00%
=19 =19 =16 =20 =17 =16 =19 =18 =18 =18 =180
R5 10 + 9 8+8 10 + 10 9 + 10 9+9 8+9 9 + 10 10 + 10 9+9 9 + 10 91 + 94 92.50%
=19 =16 =20 =19 =18 =17 =19 =20 =18 =19 =185
R6 10 + 10 10 + 9 10 + 9 10 + 10 10 + 10 10 + 9 9 + 10 10 + 8 10 + 10 8+8 97 + 93 95.00%
=20 =19 =19 =20 =20 =19 =19 =18 =20 =16 =190
R7 10 + 10 10 + 8 7 + 10 9 + 10 8 + 10 10 + 9 10 + 8 10 + 9 7 + 10 8 + 10 89 + 94 91.50%
=20 =18 =17 =19 =18 =19 =18 =19 =17 =18 =183
R8 10 + 8 9 + 10 10 + 9 10 + 8 9 + 10 9+8 10 + 9 9+8 9+8 10 + 10 95 + 88 91.50%
=18 =19 =19 =18 =19 =17 =19 =17 =17 =20 =183
R9 9+9 10 + 10 10 + 10 7 + 10 10 + 9 9 + 10 7+9 10 + 10 10 + 9 10 + 9 92 + 95 93.50%
=18 =20 =20 =17 =19 =19 =16 =20 =19 =19 =187
R10 8+9 8 + 10 9+9 8 + 10 8 + 10 10 + 10 8 + 10 10 + 10 9 + 10 9 + 10 87 + 98 92.50%
=17 =18 =18 =18 =18 =20 =18 =20 =19 =19 =185
Total 915 + 917 91.60
=1832 ±1.94%
Multimed Tools Appl
Multimed Tools Appl

Fig. 9 Choosing the optimal

decomposition level j

3 Results and discussions

3.1 Subjects

We download from internet the open-access mini-MIAS database [1], which contains 322
mammogram images sizes of 1024x1024. We picked up 200 samples randomly from the mini-
MIAS dataset—100 abnormal and 100 normal.
The abnormal contains six types as shown in Fig. 5 and a normal breast is shown in Fig. 6.
For simplification, all six abnormal types were combined as a class of “abnormal”. With this
setting, our task is to detect abnormal breast images from normal breast images.

Table 6 Comparison to state of the art methods

Author Method Sensitivity Specificity Accuracy

Milosevic (2015) [31] GLCM + SVM 20.4 87.2 62.0

Milosevic (2015) [31] GLCM + k-NN 38.9 73.8 60.7
Milosevic (2015) [31] GLCM + NBC 46.9 60.4 55.3
Yang (2015) [51] MIP + TPS 91.9 ± 2.3 70.0 ± 4.7 84.8 ± 3.1
Liu (2016) [23] WFRFT + PCA + k-NN 91.18 ± 3.41 91.56 ± 3.28 91.37 ± 3.29
Wu (2016) [49] FRFE + MLP + GA 87.72 88.12 87.92
Wu (2016) [49] FRFE + MLP + PSO 90.84 90.10 90.47
Wu (2016) [49] FRFE + MLP + BBO 90.78 91.92 91.35
Our WEE + LRC 92.00 ± 3.20 91.70 ± 3.27 91.85 ± 2.21

GLCM gray-level co-occurrence matrix, SVM support vector machine, k-NN k nearest neighbors, NBC naive
Bayesian classifier, MIP maximum intensity project, TPS thin plate spline, FRFE fractional Fourier entropy, MLP
multi-layer perceptron, GA genetic algorithm, PSO particle swarm optimization, BBO biogeography-based
optimization, WEE wavelet energy entropy, LRC linear regression classifier; Bold means the best
 Multimed Tools Appl

Table 7 WEE compared to wavelet energy and wavelet entropy (j = 4)

Feature Extraction Sensitivity Specificity Accuracy

Wavelet Energy 89.40 ± 1.78 89.70 ± 0.67 89.55 ± 1.26

Wavelet Entropy 89.90 ± 1.65 90.00 ± 0.95 89.95 ± 1.38
WEE 92.00 ± 3.20 91.70 ± 3.27 91.85 ± 2.21

3.2 Background tissue

The background tissues include three categories as shown in Fig. 7. As stated in the
introduction, fatty-glandular and dense-glandular tissues intensify the trouble of our study,
because both glands seem white on the DM image as the cancer tissues. This is the reason why
manual detection fails especially over dense-glandular.

3.3 ROI extraction

Figure 8 shows the result of ROI extraction. We can observe that the noises are attenuated, the
contrast is enhanced, the background (including the texts) and the pectoral muscle are removed
perfectly.

3.4 Optimal decomposition level

We set the decomposition level from 1 to 5 with increment of 1. The corresponding statistical
results are shown from Tables 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. Here R represents the run index, F represents the
fold index, Acc. Represents the accuracy. The format of “a + b = c” means a abnormal and b
normal breasts are correctly identified, thus in total c images are correctly identified.
We can observe that the classification performance reaches the best when the decomposi-
tion level j is 4. The overall accuracies at j = 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 are 84.80 ± 3.04%, 88.95 ± 2.54%,
90.75 ± 1.74%, 91.85 ± 2.21%, and 91.60 ± 1.94%, respectively. The comparison result is
shown in Fig. 9.

3.5 Comparison to state-of-the-art

In the fifth experiment, we compared this proposed “WEE + LRC” method with 8 state-of-the-
art methods. The results are shown in Table 6.
As it shows in Table 6, our method yields the largest sensitivity of 92.00 ± 3.20%, the
largest specificity of 91.70 ± 3.27%, and the largest accuracy of 91.85 ± 2.21%. Our perfor-
mances are better than other eight methods in terms of sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy.

Table 8 Time Analysis of our method

State Consumed Time (Unit: Second)

WEE Calculation 3.72

LRC Classification 0.06
Multimed Tools Appl

3.6 The effect of WEE

In the six experiment, we compared the proposed WEE with traditional wavelet energy and
wavelet entropy. Only the feature extraction methods are different, and all the other settings are
the same as in Section 3.5. The comparison results are listed in Table 7.
Table 7 shows that the best feature extraction method is the proposed WEE. The next is the
wavelet entropy method, which yields a sensitivity of 89.90 ± 1.65, a specificity of 90.00
± 0.95, and an accuracy of 89.95 ± 1.38. The worst is the wavelet energy method, which yields
a sensitivity of 89.40 ± 1.78, a specificity of 89.70 ± 0.67, and an accuracy of 89.55 ± 1.26.
Nevertheless, we see that the standard deviation of WEE is larger than other two methods. In
the future, we shall try to alleviate its deviation. Besides, we shall also apply our method to
detect other diseases, for example, the Alzheimer’s disease [25, 36, 38, 55], multiple sclerosis
[58], hearing loss [13, 22], etc.

3.7 Time analysis

In the final experiment, we reported the consumed time of our method in Table 8. For a
1024x1024 breast image, it costs about 3.72 sec over the WEE calculation, and costs about
0.06 sec over the LRC classification. The large size of 1024x1024 causes the long computation
time of WEE. For LRC, since the WEE can be regarded as a dimensionality reduction
procedure and the sample number is only 200, it only costs about 0.06 sec.

4 Conclusion

In this study, we proposed a novel method for detecting abnormal breasts based on two mature
techniques—wavelet energy entropy and linear regression classifier. The results are better than
5 state-of-the-art methods. In the future, we shall utilize the latest researches such as low-rank
representation and sparse representation to extract more robust features, which probably
enhances the robustness of the system.

Acknowledgments This paper was supported by NSFC (61602250, 61503188, 61562041, 61271374), Natural
Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (BK20150983, BK20150982), Program of Natural Science Research of
Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions (14KJB520021), Open Research Fund of Hunan Provincial Key Labora-
tory of Network Investigational Technology (2016WLZC013), Open Fund of Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory
of Data Intensive Computing (BD201607), Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Image and Video Understanding for
Social Safety, Nanjing University of Science and Technology (30916014107).

References

1. (2016) The mini-MIAS database of mammograms. Available from: http://peipa.essex.ac.uk/info/mias.html

2. Abdel-Nasser M et al (2015) Analysis of tissue abnormality and breast density in mammographic images
using a uniform local directional pattern. Exp Syst Appl 42(24):9499–9511
3. Adamekova E et al (2003) The effect of psychoemotional stress on chemically induced mammary
carcinogenesis in female rats. Biologia 58(5):991–994
4. Agarwal P (2016) Artificial intelligence and its applications 2014. Math Probl Eng, Article ID: 3871575
5. Ammari ML et al (2016) Feasible generalized least squares estimation of channel and noise covariance
matrices for MIMO systems. Can J Electr Comput Eng 39(1):42–50
 Multimed Tools Appl

6. Arnawa I (2015) Image enhancement using Homomorphic filtering and adaptive median filtering for
Balinese Papyrus (Lontar). Int J Adv Comput Sci Appl 6(8):250–255
7. Balochian S (2014) Artificial intelligence and its applications. Math Probl Eng, Article ID: 840491
8. Cattani C, Rao R (2016) Tea category identification using a novel fractional Fourier Entropy and Jaya
Algorithm. Entropy 18(3), Article ID: 77
9. Denis G, Strissel K (2015) Cardiometabolic abnormalities associate with an inflammatory cytokine profile
in breast adipose tissue and plasma of obese African American women. J Immunol 194:2
10. Domingo L et al (2016) Cross-national comparison of screening mammography accuracy measures in US,
Norway, and Spain. Eur Radiol 26(8):2520–2528
11. Evangelista AL, Santos EMM (2012) Cluster of symptoms in women with breast cancer treated with
curative intent. Supportive Care Cancer 20(7):1499–1506
12. Gorgel P et al (2015) Computer-aided classification of breast masses in mammogram images based on
spherical wavelet transform and support vector machines. Expert Syst 32(1):155–164
13. Gorriz JM, Ramírez J () Wavelet entropy and directed acyclic graph support vector machine for detection of
patients with unilateral hearing loss in MRI scanning. Front Comput Neurosci 2016(10), Article ID: 160
14. Hemmati F et al (2016) Roller bearing acoustic signature extraction by wavelet packet transform, applica-
tions in fault detection and size estimation. Appl Acoust 104:101–118
15. Ignatiadis M et al (2016) Liquid biopsy-based clinical research in early breast cancer: The EORTC 90091–
10093 Treat CTC trial. Eur J Cancer 63:97–104
16. Javed A et al (2016) Dynamic 3-D MR visualization and detection of upper airway obstruction during sleep
using region-growing segmentation. IEEE Trans Biomed Eng 63(2):431–437
17. Jeon S (2014) Haptically assisting breast tumor detection by augmenting abnormal lump. IEICE Trans Inf
Syst E97D(2):361–365
18. Kam JWY et al (2016) Sustained attention abnormalities in breast cancer survivors with cognitive deficits
post chemotherapy: an electrophysiological study. Clin Neurophysiol 127(1):369–378
19. Kassayova M et al (2007) Effect of a short-term and long-term melatonin administration on mammary
carcinogenesis in female Sprague–Dawley rats influenced by repeated psychoemotional stress. Acta Vet
Brno 76(3):371–377
20. Kolade VO, Meseeha MG (2016) Capsule commentary on tosteson et al., variation in screening abnormality
rates and follow-Up of breast, cervical and colorectal cancer screening within the PROSPR consortium. J
Gen Intern Med 31(4):411–411
21. Leng XX et al (2016) A multi-scale plane-detection method based on the Hough transform and region
growing. Photogramm Rec 31(154):166–192
22. Li J (2016) Detection of left-sided and right-sided hearing loss via fractional Fourier transform. Entropy
18(5), Article ID: 194
23. Liu G (2016) Computer-aided diagnosis of abnormal breasts in mammogram images by weighted-type
fractional Fourier transform. Adv Mech Eng 8(2), Article ID: 11.
24. Liu Y, et al (2013) Extraction and analysis of EEG features under electric stimulation. In international
conference on medical imaging physics and engineering (Icmipe). Shenyang, PEOPLES R CHINA. pp.
254–258
25. Liu G et al (2016) Detection of Alzheimer’s disease by three-dimensional displacement field estimation in
structural magnetic resonance imaging. J Alzheimers Dis 50(1):233–248
26. Lu DY (2016) A hybrid optimization method for multiplicative noise and blur removal. J Comput Appl
Math 302:224–233
27. Majdak-Paredes EJ et al (2015) Integrated algorithm for reconstruction of complex forms of Poland
syndrome: 20-year outcomes. J Plast Reconstr Aesthetic Surg 68(10):1386–1394
28. Makandar A, Halalli B (2016) Threshold based segmentation technique for mass detection in mammogra-
phy. J Comput 11(6):472–478
29. Martel-Billard C et al (2016) Trisomy 21 and breast cancer: a genetic abnormality which protects against
breast cancer? Gynecol Obstet Fertil 44(4):211–217
30. Matsuoka J et al (2016) Switching non-local vector median filter. Opt Rev 23(2):195–207
31. Milosevic M et al (2015) Comparative analysis of breast cancer detection in mammograms and thermo-
grams. Biomed Eng-Biomedizinische Technik 60(1):49–56
32. Mojra A et al (2009) Abnormal mass detection in a real breast model: a computational tactile sensing
approach. In world congress on medical physics and biomedical engineering. Springer, Munich,
GERMANY, pp 115–118
33. Munir A et al (2016) A review of 66 consecutive patients investigated for mammographic abnormalities by
digital tomosynthesis guided vacuum assisted breast biopsy. Cancer Res 76:2
34. Naseem I et al (2010) Linear regression for face recognition. IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell 32(11):
2106–2112
Multimed Tools Appl

35. Oztekin A et al (2016) A data analytic approach to forecasting daily stock returns in an emerging market.
Eur J Oper Res 253(3):697–710
36. Phillips P (2016) Three-dimensional eigenbrain for the detection of subjects and brain regions related with
Alzheimer’s disease. J Alzheimers Dis 50(4):1163–1179
37. Phillips M, et al (2014) Rapid point-of-care breath test for biomarkers of breast cancer and abnormal
mammograms. Plos One 9(3), Article ID: e90226
38. Phillips P et al (2015) Detection of Alzheimer’s disease and mild cognitive impairment based on structural
volumetric MR images using 3D-DWT and WTA-KSVM trained by PSOTVAC. Biomed Signal Proc
Control 21:58–73
39. Racz JM et al (2016) Improving patient flow and timeliness in the diagnosis and management of breast
abnormalities: the impact of a rapid diagnostic unit. Curr Oncol 23(3):E260–E265
40. Renaudeau C et al (2016) Evaluation of sentinel lymph node biopsy after previous breast surgery for breast
cancer: GATA study. Breast 28:54–59
41. Seal A et al (2014) Histogram of bunched intensity values based thermal face recognition. In: Kryszkiewicz
M et al (eds) Rough sets and intelligent systems paradigms. Springer-Verlag Berlin, Berlin, pp 367–374
42. Seigneurin A et al (2016) Overdiagnosis and overtreatment associated with breast cancer mammography
screening: a simulation study with calibration to population-based data. Breast 28:60–66
43. Tagliafico AS et al (2016) Diagnostic performance of contrast-enhanced spectral mammography: systematic
review and meta-analysis. Breast 28:13–19
44. Tahir MA et al (2011) Face recognition using multi-scale local phase quantisation and linear regression
classifier. In international conference on image processing. IEEE, Brussels, BELGIUM, pp 765–768
45. Talib Z et al (2016) A community-oriented approach to breast cancer in a low-resource setting: improving
awareness, early detection and treatment of breast cancer in Tajikistan. Breast J 22(3):330–334
46. Wantanajittikul K et al (2016) Automatic cardiac T2*relaxation time estimation from magnetic resonance
images using region growing method with automatically initialized seed points. Comput Methods Prog
Biomed 130:76–86
47. Wei G (2010) Color image enhancement based on HVS and PCNN. SCIENCE CHINA Inf Sci 53(10):
1963–1976
48. Winkel RR, et al (2016) Mammographic density and structural features can individually and jointly
contribute to breast cancer risk assessment in mammography screening: a case–control study. BMC
Cancer 16 DOI: 10.1186/s12885-016-2450-7 (Online)
49. Wu X (2016) Smart detection on abnormal breasts in digital mammography based on contrast-limited
adaptive histogram equalization and chaotic adaptive real-coded biogeography-based optimization.
SIMULATION 92(9):873–885
50. Xiao LM et al (2016) An enhancement method for X-ray image via fuzzy noise removal and homomorphic
filtering. Neurocomputing 195:56–64
51. Yang SN, et al (2015) Identification of breast cancer using integrated information from MRI and mam-
mography. Plos One 10(6), Article ID: e0128404
52. Yu J, et al (2013) A new method for gyroscope fault diagnosis based on CGA RBFNN and multi-wavelet
entropy. In international conference on Mechatronic sciences, electric engineering and computer. Shenyang,
PEOPLES R CHINA. pp 39–43
53. Yu XY, et al (2016) Retrospective and comparative analysis of Tc-99 m-Sestamibi breast specific gamma
imaging versus mammography, ultrasound, and magnetic resonance imaging for the detection of breast
cancer in Chinese women. BMC Cancer 16 Article ID: 450
54. Yu WB et al (2016) Research of improved adaptive median filter algorithm. In international conference on
electrical and information technologies for rail transportation: transportation. Zhuzhou, PEOPLES R
CHINA, Springer, pp 27–34
55. Yuan TF (2015) Detection of subjects and brain regions related to Alzheimer’s disease using 3D MRI scans
based on eigenbrain and machine learning. Front Comput Neurosci 9, Article ID: 66
56. Zaharescu E (2007) Morphological enhancement of medical images in a logarithmic image environment. In:
Sanei S et al (eds) International conference on digital signal processing, 15th edn. Ieee, Cardiff, WALES, pp
171–174
57. Zhang Y, Wu L (2008) Improved Image Filter based on SPCNN. Sci China F: Inf Sci 51(12):2115–2125
58. Zhou X-X (2016) Comparison of machine learning methods for stationary wavelet entropy-based multiple
sclerosis detection: decision tree, k-nearest neighbors, and support vector machine. Simulation 92(9):861–
871
59. Zubor P et al (2015) Gene expression abnormalities in histologically normal breast epithelium from patients
with luminal type of breast cancer. Mol Biol Rep 42(5):977–988
 Multimed Tools Appl

Prof. Dr. Yi Chen received the Ph.D. degree in the School of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing
University of Science and Technology (NUST) in 2012. His current research interests include pattern recognition,
compute vision and image processing.

Prof. Dr. Yin Zhang is an Assistant Professor of the School of Information and Safety Engineering, Zhongnan
University of Economics and Law, China. He was a Poster-Doctoral Fellow in the School of Computer Science
and Technology at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China. He is Vice-chair of IEEE Computer
Society Big Data STC. His research interests include data analysis, data mining, healthcare big data and social
network. He has published more than 30 prestigious conference and journal papers. He serves as Guest Editor for
IEEE Sensors Journal and New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia. He also served as TPC Co-Chair of
CloudComp 2015, and Local Chair of TRIDENTCOM 2014.
Multimed Tools Appl

Prof. Dr. Huimin Lu received a B.S. degree in Electronics Information Science and Technology from Yangzhou
University in 2008. He received M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Kyushu Institute of Technology and
Yangzhou University in 2011. He received a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Kyushu Institute of
Technology in 2014. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in Kyushu Institute of Technology and he also serves
as an Excellent Young Researcher of MEXT-Japan. His current research interests include computer vision,
robotics, artificial intelligence, and ocean observing.

Prof. Dr. Xianqing Chen got his Ph.D. degree from Southeast University in 2013. Now he is a lecturer in
Zhejiang Normal University. His research interest is image processing.
 Multimed Tools Appl

Prof. Dr. Jianwu Li received the B.S., M.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees from Tianjin University, China, in 1997, 2000
and 2003, respectively. He is currently an Associate Professor with the School of Computer Science and
Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, China. He has authored more than 20 scientific papers in peer-
reviewed journals and conferences. His research interests include image processing, pattern recognition and
evolutionary computing.

Prof. Dr. Shuihua Wang received a B.S. from Southeast University in 2008 and a M.S. from The City
University of New York in 2012. She received her Ph.D. from Nanjing University in 2016. At present, she
works as an assistant professor in Nanjing Normal University. Her research interest is biomedical imaging.