IET Computer Vision

Special Issue: Computer Vision in Cancer Data Analysis

Mammographic mass classification using ISSN 1751-9632

Received on 21st December 2017
Revised 25th April 2018
filter response patches Accepted on 29th June 2018
E-First on 13th August 2018
doi: 10.1049/iet-cvi.2018.5244
www.ietdl.org

Zobia Suhail1 , Azam Hamidinekoo2, Reyer Zwiggelaar2

1Punjab University College of Information Technology, University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan
2Department of Computer Science, Aberystwyth University, Wales SY23 3DB, UK
E-mail: zobia.suhail@pucit.edu.pk

Abstract: Considering the importance of early diagnosis of breast cancer, a supervised patch-wise texton-based approach has
been developed for the classification of mass abnormalities in mammograms. The proposed method is based on texture-based
classification of masses in mammograms and does not require segmentation of the mass region. In this approach, patches from
filter bank responses are utilised for generating the texton dictionary. The methodology is evaluated on the publicly available
Digital Database for Screening Mammography database. Using a naive Bayes classifier, a classification accuracy of 83% with
an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.89 was obtained. Experimental results demonstrated that the
patch-wise texton-based approach in conjunction with the naive Bayes classifier constructs an efficient and alternative approach
for automatic mammographic mass classification.

1 Introduction developed equipped with the classification of several breast

Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed cancer worldwide,
and accounts for 25.2% of the total cancer-related deaths among
women [1]. Mammography, as the primary imaging modality for
diagnosing breast cancer, is used to identify abnormalities at an
early stage when treatment can be most effective. Architectural
distortion, (micro)calcifications and masses are considered as the
most commonly found abnormalities on mammographic scans
(called mammograms) [2]. The size, morphology and density of
these abnormalities can be used in diagnosing their potentially
cancerous (malignant) or non-cancerous (benign) nature [2],
although currently all abnormalities are assessed with histology.
However, there is a significant variation in these morphological
features which makes manual evaluation difficult. Therefore,
building systems which can effectively provide automatic
detection, segmentation and classification of such lesions based on
machine learning methods has become one of the challenging areas
in mammographic computer aided diagnosis (CAD) systems.
Separate or combinational CAD systems have been developed for
analysing these types of abnormalities to provide radiologists with
a second opinion. Classification of benign and malignant masses in
mammograms is a complex task due to the low contrast between
the mass and the surrounding breast tissues [3, 4]. In this study, we
address the problem of mass classification in mammograms [5] and
propose a new method for the classification of benign and
malignant mammographic masses using a modified version of a
texton-based approach using patches extracted from filter response
images. The novelty of the work is to exploit the neighbouring
structures from multiple filter response images of mammographic
masses in order to extract a more detailed representation of the
mass. As the small patches are used for the overall model
development and evaluation, the particular mass area is more
emphasised by avoiding the unnecessary details from the area
containing breast tissues. The idea can be applied to the
classification of other breast abnormalities (e.g. micro-
calcifications), as the concept of using small patches from the filter
response images extracts multiple localised aspects of the
abnormalities. From each filter response image the small patches
are representing the distribution of the data separately for breast
tissue and the abnormalities. Hence, by using the proposed patch-
based texton approach, a generalised CAD system can be
abnormalities.
2 Related work
A ‘mass’ is a space-occupying lesion that can be projected in
different views (e.g. Cranial-Caudal and MedioLateral-Oblique). A
potential mass seen in only a single projection is called a ‘density’
until its three dimensionality is confirmed. According to the breast
imaging reporting and data systems [6], the information about mass
shape, margin and density can be considered to define it as benign
or malignant. In the CAD literature, common features which are
used for mass classification include intensity, size, shape, texture
and location associated features [7–9].
Several textural features have been studied in the past for the
purpose of classifying mammographic masses as either benign or
malignant [7, 8, 10–12]. Mudigonda et al. [7] extracted grey-level
co-occurence matrix (GLCM)-based texture features from the mass
region and ribbon pixels surrounding the mass region in order to
classify the mass as benign or malignant. They extracted the
boundary of the mass area using polygon modelling. They
evaluated the performance of their proposed method on 54 images
of which 28 were benign and 26 were malignant and reported the
best classification accuracy (CA) to be 82.1% with an area under
the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve equal to 0.85.
Campos et al. [10] used independent component analysis (ICA)
to extract features for classifying mammograms as either normal,
benign or malignant. They used the Mammographic Image
Analysis Society (MIAS) database [total 200 regions of interest
(RoIs)] for evaluation of classification performance with neural
networks (NNs) (multilayer perceptron NNs, probabilistic NNs and
radial basis function NNs). They reported that the best results were
achieved by using probabilistic NNs leading to an accuracy of
97.3%.
Valarmathie et al. [11] used shape, margin and textural features
of pre-segmented masses including average intensity, average
contrast, smoothness of the intensity in the region, uniformity of
intensity and skewness of the histogram. They used images from
the mini-MIAS database from which 200 images were used for
training and 132 for testing. Their best reported CA was equal to
94% using a combination of margin and shape features. Similarly,
Rangayyan et al. [13] proposed a region-based measure of image
edge profile acutance along with other shape features like

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© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2018
compactness, Fourier descriptors, moments and chord length in
order to classify circumscribed and spiculated tumours. They used
54 images (39 from MIAS and 15 local cases) for experiments.
They reported the importance of adding edge-based features with
shape information by using their proposed acutance that alone
achieved a CA of 95%, whereas a similar CA has been achieved by
combining acutance with moment-based shape measure and
Fourier descriptors. Boujelben et al. [14] used the boundary
information of the mass region to characterise them as benign or
malignant. They used features including radial distance measure,
convexity and angular features to describe the boundary of the
mass region. The Digital Database for Screening Mammography
(DDSM) database was used, where 200 images (100 benign and
100 malignant) were used for performance evaluation. The
classification was performed using K-nearest neighbour (KNN)
and multilayer perceptron (MLP) classifiers and the best results
were reported using an MLP classifier where they achieved a
specificity equal to 97.9% and sensitivity equal to 94.2%.
Mu et al. [8] used 22 shape and textural features (5 shapes, 3
edge-sharpness measures and 14 textures). Subsequently, a genetic
algorithm (GA) was used for feature selection and improved
classification results (Az = 0.95) were reported by using the
combination of shape, edge sharpness and texture features. Rouhi
et al. [12] extracted shape, intensity and texture features after
segmenting the mass regions. Performing feature selection using
GA, classification results were reported on different classifiers
including random forest, naive Bayes, support vector machine
(SVM) and KNN and using the MIAS and DDSM databases they
reported their best CA as 96.47%. Ertas et al. [15] computed
geometric parameters (area, perimeter, circularity, normalised
circularity, Fourier descriptors etc.) for the basic shape of the
segmented mass area and reported that normalised circulatory area
and Fourier coefficients can be used more effectively in order to
classify benign and malignant masses. They reported a CA of 92%
(23 out of 25 biopsy-proven mammographic masses were correctly
classified) by analysing shape features. Dong et al. [16] used a
feature set comprising of shape, margin, texture and intensity
features (32-dimensional feature set) for the classification of
benign and malignant mass in mammograms after segmenting the
mass region. They evaluated the performance of their proposed
feature set with several classifiers (random forest, SVM, decision
tree etc.) using different combinations of features and reported the
best CA equal to 97.73% using the combination of all features with
an optimised version of SVM. Ball and Bruce [9] evaluated the
validity of their proposed level set segmentation technique by
classifying the mass region into benign and malignant. They
extracted two distinct feature sets, where the first feature set
consisted of patient age, morphological features, normalised radial
length based features and the features extracted from GLCM. The
second feature set contained features extracted from the segmented
boundary and the area outside the boundary region. After selecting
optimal features using stepwise linear discriminant analysis, they
performed the classification using a KNN classifier and reported an
overall CA equal to 87%.
On the other hand, instead of selecting features from the
segmented mass area, it is possible to extract features from RoIs in
order to classify the mass abnormality [17, 18]. In [17], a CAD
system for three different types of mammographic patches, i.e.
normal, benign and malignant was proposed. The local
configuration pattern (LCP) algorithm was used for feature
extraction which was then concatenated with the statistical and
frequency domain features. They reported the results of classifying
new ensemble features using four different classifiers, where the
best accuracy achieved was 94.67% using the new feature
ensemble. Another three-class classification method was proposed
by Buciu and Gacsadi [18], in which the directional features were
extracted by filtering image patches using Gabor wavelets. After
reducing the data dimensionality (for both filtered and original
mammographic patches) using principal component analysis
(PCA), they reported better classification results when Gabor
features were used instead of using original mammographic
images. They reported best results as Az = 0.79 for normal versus
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© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2018
tumour cases and Az = 0.78 was reported for benign versus
malignant tumours.
Texton-based approaches have shown promising results for
generic texture classification using single images [19], in which the
textures are represented as histograms of textons in a texton
dictionary. Varma and Zisserman [19] incorporated filter responses
to build a texton dictionary. To improve the method, they used a
joint distribution of intensity values for patches of a particular size
[20] and concluded that raw image patches could be used to
classify different textures. They reported improved CA of 97.17%
when a joint distribution of intensities was used compared to the
filter responses where the CA was 96.37% using the same
experimental setup for both approaches.
The work done in the past on the classification of benign and
malignant masses using textons is limited compared to other
texture classification techniques [11, 21]. Unlike the texton-based
work proposed by Li et al. [22], who used sub-sampling before
applying a texton-based approach (with the CA equal to 85.96%),
we have used a modified version of the texton-based approach on
the original dataset without applying any sub-sampling of the data,
but we have subdivided the filter responses into small patches and
used those patches to build the texton dictionary. The proposed
work used the patches from the filter response images rather than
the raw data patches [20] from a single image to build the model
for classification. The first reason for developing this approach is
that the filter responses will enhance the characteristic features of
masses, e.g. edges and linear aspects. A second reason for using
filter response images rather than raw image patches is the clear
difference of CA achieved by using patches from the filter response
images rather than the raw image data (covered in Section 5.1). So
the novelty of this method is the aggregation of several pixel
responses for each filter response image which is shown to be more
useful in getting appropriate descriptors for the classification of
benign and malignant mammographic masses.
3 Methodology
The proposed method is based on a modified version of the work
done by Varma and Zisserman [19] and we used patches from filter
response images for model generation, unlike the original work
where the authors used the filter response for each pixel for the
purpose of model generation and evaluation. The overall process
consists of four main steps, i.e. dataset preparation, generating
filter responses, model generation and model evaluation. The
details of each step are described in subsequent sub-sections. An
overview of the full methodology is shown in Fig. 1.
3.1 Data preparation
In our experiment, the DDSM [23] was used which comprises
∼2500 cases and also provides associated patient information (age,
subtlety rating for abnormalities etc.), scanner and image
information (spatial resolution) in addition to pixel-level ‘ground
truth’ for the regions containing the abnormality. The dataset has
been used by the research community to evaluate the performance
of developed methods for segmentation/classification of a range of
mammographic abnormalities. A subset of 300 mass lesions (150
benign; 150 malignant) was randomly selected from the DDSM
database. Using the annotated RoI provided as part of the dataset, a
bounding box for each mass was extracted and resized into 225 × 
225 pixels.
Data is needed for texton model generation and subsequently
for mass classification. To avoid bias we have split the 300 cases
into a separate texton model generation and evaluation dataset.
From the selected dataset, 200 cases were used for the texton
model generation and 100 cases were used for evaluation of the
proposed method which is distinct from the data used for texton
model generation.
We have used the generated texton models for the remaining
100 cases to obtain the features to be used for mass classification.
The evaluation dataset was partitioned into training and testing
[using ten-fold cross-validation (10-FCV), see Section 4] in such a
way that no abnormality from a patient was included in both the
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Fig. 1  Generating the texton dictionary from patches of filter responses. As can be seen, all filter response images are sub-divided into non-overlapping
patches of size 7 × 7 before texton dictionary generation
Fig. 2  Process of generating the dataset. The red boundaries in the
mammogram on the left side are showing annotations provided with the
dataset, whereas the blue squares around the red boundary are showing the
bounding box around the abnormality. The bounding box is extracted and
resized to 225 × 225 pixels
training and testing data (in the DDSM dataset some cases contain
more than one abnormality). The details of producing the dataset
can be seen in Fig. 2.
3.2 Generating filter responses
A combination of 53 filters (of size 49 × 49) from the maximum
response (MR) and Schmid (S) filter banks [19] were selected
which are shown in Fig. 3. The first 40 filters are obtained from the
MR filter bank and are a mixture of edge, bar, Gaussian and
Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG) filters. The edge and bar filters are
obtained at six orientations and three scales [(σx; σy) = (1,3), (2, 6),
(4, 12)], for the Gaussian filter with σ = 10 and for the three LoG
filters with σ = 3, 10, 12. The other 13 filters are obtained from the
S filter bank, including various isotropic Gabor-like filters [24] of
the form
πτr −(r2 /2σ)
F(r, σ, τ) = F0(σ, τ) + cos e (1)
σ
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with values for the (σ, τ) pair set as (2,1), (4,1), (4,2), (6,1), (6,2),
(6,3), (8,1), (8,2), (8,3), (10,1), (10,2), (10,3) and (10,4). These
filters are: rotationally invariant, isotropic and anisotropic, multi-
scale and at multiple orientations. With such characteristics, they
can generate appropriate features for various types of textures. The
RoIs were then convolved with each of the filter (see Section 3.1).
The resulting filter responses on one of the sample patches from
the input dataset are shown in Fig. 3. The filter responses were
normalised to zero mean and unit variance. Experiments showed
that this pre-processing improved the overall classification results.
3.3 Model generation
After getting filter response images, each RoI is sub-divided into 7 
× 7 patches. The number of patches extracted from each filter
response image is 625 (size of filter response image 175 × 175,
ends up with 625 patches, each of size 7 × 7). As already explained
in Section 3.1, texton model generation data comprised of 200
images (100 benign and 100 malignant) and there are in total 53
filter responses for each RoI. So, we got 3,312,500 patches for each
of the benign and malignant classes. The patches were extracted in
a non-overlapping fashion; additional patches could be extracted,
but this was not done at this stage due to computer memory
restrictions. All the extracted patches are converted to 1D vectors
of length 49. At this point, texton model generation data for a
particular class c is defined as
Dc ∈ (benign | malignant) = [X1, X2, X3, …Xm] (2)
where m = 3,312,500 and Xi is defined as
Xi = [y1, y2, y3, …yn] (3)
with n = 49, and Xi is a 1D vector representation of a 7×7 patch.
After data generation, a texton dictionary was build using K-
means clustering as in [19], estimating k textons by solving the
following optimisation problem for a particular class c:
k
argmin ∑ ∑ ∥ Xk − T j ∥2 (4)
T j = 1 Xk ∈ Dc
After applying K-means clustering for each of the benign and
malignant classes, texton model generation data for both classes
were partitioned into k clusters and the texton Tj is referred to by
the mean vector of a particular cluster j ( j ≤ k). For the current
work, we used 10 clusters for each of the benign and malignant
classes (10 textons/class). The final texton dictionary was
generated by merging the textons from both classes. This
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Fig. 3  Process of generating filter responses for a sample image. Fifty-three filters (from the MR and S filter banks) are shown on the left side of the image.
The middle image shows a sample image that has been convolved with the filters and the results are shown on the right

Fig. 4  Process of generating histograms from a test image. Each red box within one particular filter response corresponds to a 7 × 7 patch that has been
assigned to the most similar texton from the texton dictionary (Fig. 1). Finally, a frequency histogram is generated for one filter response image that represents
the frequency distribution of all the textons contained in the texton dictionary for a particular filter response. Subsequently, the histograms for all filter
responses were concatenated into a single feature vector

specification leads to 20 textons (T1, T2, T3, … T20) from which 10
textons belong to the benign class (T1 … T10) and 10 to the
malignant class (T11 … T20). Based on our experiments, 10 clusters
is an appropriate cluster representation for 200 samples per class
considering memory and computational expense (see Section 4).
In the work proposed by Varma and Zisserman [19, 20], the
final model consisted of the texton frequency histogram where the
histograms were representing the probability distribution of each
texton for each texton model generation sample (therefore, the total
number of models was equal to the total number of texton model
generation samples that were used for model generation), whereas
in the proposed approach the final model comprised the textons
(cluster centroids), which will be used to generate the features and
perform evaluation.
3.4 Model evaluation
For the evaluation, a feature set was generated for the data based
on the model developed in Section 3.3. For feature-set generation,
the same initial steps were repeated with the evaluation data: i.e.
after getting filter responses for each RoI from the evaluation
dataset, the filter response images were divided into 7 × 7 patches
and subsequently converted into a 1D vector. The next step was to
assign each data vector to the closest texton from the texton
dictionary (generated in Section 3.3). The Euclidean distance was
used as the metric to estimate the similarity. After that frequency
histograms were generated for each filter response, where each bin
of the histogram represented the frequency of a particular texton in
a particular filter response image. Fig. 4 shows the process of
generating a frequency histogram from one of the filter response
images from the evaluation data. Such histograms were generated
for each of the 53 filter response images for each evaluation RoI,
resulting in 53 histograms for a single evaluation image. The final
feature vector was represented by aggregating the texton
distribution for all 53 filter responses for a test RoI, resulting in a
feature vector with dimension equal to 1060 (i.e. 20 × 53). The
most salient features were extracted (to reduce the data
dimensionality) using Weka [25], where the CfsSubsetEval
attribute evaluator was used along with the BestFirst search
method. CfsSubsetEval evaluates the level of a subset of attributes
by evaluating the individual predictive ability of each feature along
with the degree of redundancy between them. Whereas, the
BestFirst search method searches the subset of the total attribute
space by using greedy hill climbing with added backtracking
facility. In this way, the total attributes have been reduced from
1060 to 17. Varma and Zisserman [19, 20] used the KNN approach
for the final classification, where they used Chi-square statistics to
compare the histogram corresponding to the evaluation data with

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Table 1 Confusion matrix by using filter response patches
Benign Malignant
benign 41 9
malignant 8 42

Fig. 5  ROC curve for the proposed method plotting the false positive rate
against the true positive rate. The operating points on the curve where the
CA was 83% have been indicated
Fig. 6  Randomly selected correctly classified instances
(a), (b) Instances from benign class, (c), (d) Malignant RoIs
the histograms that have been generated as a model, whereas here
we used a naive Bayes classifier using bootstrap aggregation to
report the final evaluation results.

4 Results and discussion

We have evaluated the developed approach on a subset of the
DDSM data, where the evaluation data consisted of 100 images (50
benign and 50 malignant). Evaluation data was prepared in a way
that only one mass would be included as a test/training instance for
one case (as mentioned in Section 3.1) and a 10-FCV scheme was
employed. The obtained CA was 83% (±8.23), with Az equal to
0.89 which is comparable to state-of-the-art results (see Section 5
for comparison). The confusion matrix for all 100 evaluation cases
is shown in Table 1. The results in Table 1 are showing the results
for all the 10 folds, therefore are representing the results for all 100
samples used for model evaluation.
The ROC curve for the proposed method can be found in Fig. 5.
Some correctly classified instances can be seen in Fig. 6.
Evaluation results of the texton-based approach were influenced
by the number of clusters (or textons) defined for the K-means
clustering. We investigated the effect of texton dictionary size on
the overall performance. As can be seen in Fig. 7, the best results
in terms of CA(%) and Az value were obtained by setting the
number of clusters equal to 10 per class (benign and malignant),
with the size of texton dictionary equal to 20. In the original work
proposed by Varma and Zisserman [19], they mentioned that the
overall classification results were improved by increasing the size
of clusters per class.
Another important factor for the patch-based texton approach is
the size of the patch used for the texton dictionary generation. For
the proposed work, patch size of 7 × 7 resulted in improved
classification results as compared to other patch sizes (3 × 3, 5 × 5,
9 × 9 and 11 × 11). The results in terms of CA and Az for several
patch sizes can be found in Table 2.
4.1 Discussion on misclassified instances
In total there were 17 misclassified instances (9 instances are
misclassified from the benign class and 8 are misclassified from
the malignant class). When the misclassified instances were
investigated, it was found that most of the instances were
misclassified due to noise artefacts or inclusion of tissue other than
the breast region (i.e. pectoral muscle), which were rare in the used
dataset. Two randomly selected misclassified RoIs for both classes
can be found in Fig. 8.
Figs. 8a and b show benign RoIs that were misclassified by the
proposed method. It can be seen that Fig. 8a contains a dark region
Fig. 7  Classification accuracy (CA) and area under the RoC (Az)
evaluation for different values for the number of clusters per class
that is not the part of the breast area. The same aspect can be seen
in Fig. 8d, where a malignant RoI was classified as benign. From
Fig. 8b, it can be seen that the image contains the pectoral muscle
containing different textural information compared to the breast
area, hence the overall texton histogram was also different from the
actual representation of the benign mass. Similarly, some noise
aspects can be observed in Fig. 8c, where a malignant RoI was
classified as benign.
5 Comparison
As the proposed method is derived from the texton-based
approaches [20], in this section a detailed comparison of the
proposed work with the original texton-based approach and
alternative techniques are presented.
5.1 Traditional texton-based approach
According to the texton-based work [20], the overall classification
was improved when raw data patches from the images
(representing textures) were taken instead of using filter responses.
Varma and Zisserman [20] concluded that filter responses were not
necessary and the raw image data could be used to classify the
texture classes by extracting very compact size patches [20]. This
section presents some classification results when raw image data
was used instead of using the filter response images.
To be consistent with the approach presented for the mass
classification using filter responses, again the dataset was
comprised of 200 RoIs (100 benign and 100 malignant) for model
building and 100 (50 benign and 50 malignant) for evaluating the
developed model. The original image RoIs (size equals to 225 × 

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Table 2 Results for different patch sizes used
Patch size CA, % Az
3 × 3 75 0.81
5 × 5 80 0.83
7 × 7 83 0.89
9 × 9 70 0.78
11 × 11 67 0.69
The bold values are represented the optimum value for patch size in terms of best
classification accuracy.

225) from the dataset were resized to 175 × 175 (for the filter-based
method size of the input image was the same, i.e. 225 × 225 and
were reduced to 175 × 175 after getting filter responses).
Subsequently, patches of size 7 × 7 were extracted from each
RoI representing the mass region. Overlapping patches were
extracted in order to get additional samples from the model
building images to capture data variations. For a single RoI, 28,561
patches of size 7 × 7 were extracted. In total, 2,856,100 patches
were extracted for each of the benign and malignant classes. For K-
means clustering, k was set to 10, which resulted in 10 clusters for
each class. The overall set-up is quite similar to the approach
presented in this paper except that the patches are now representing Fig. 8  Randomly selected misclassified instances
the raw image data instead of using filter response images. After (a), (b) Benign RoIs, (c), (d) RoIs from the malignant class
generating the texton dictionary, evaluation data was used with a
similar processing pipeline. A histogram was generated for each Table 3 Confusion matrix using raw image patches
evaluation RoI which was assigned to the closest texton. This
Benign Malignant
histogram was then used as a feature for classifying masses but the
length of the feature vector in this case is 20 instead of 1060 as was benign 34 16
the case when using filter response patches. malignant 14 36
The classification setup was the same, i.e. using a naive Bayes
classifier and a 10-FCV scheme. After attribute selection the total
number of attributes was reduced to 5. The final CA when using Table 4 Overview of existing techniques developed for
raw image patches was 70% with the Az value equal to 73%. The mass classification in mammograms
confusion matrix for this experiment can be seen in Table 3, which Author Features Best reported
shows a considerable difference in terms of true and false classified results, %
instances compared to the results in Table 1. Rangayyan et al. [13] shape, textures CA = 95
From the presented classification results for benign and Mudigonda et al. [7] shape, texture CA = 82.1
malignant masses, unlike the material texture classification [20], Valarmathie et al. [11] shape, margin and CA = 94
patches from the filter responses are more useful rather than using texture
raw image patches. The likely reason is that both benign and
Mu et al. [8] shape, texture Az = 0.95
malignant mass areas are very similar in terms of intensity values,
but the filter responses are useful for producing more distinct Rouhni et al. [12] shape, texture CA = 96.47
features (e.g. boundaries and lines) to classify both classes. Campos et al. [10] ICA CA = 97.3
Dong et al. [16] mass area CA = 97.73
5.2 Comparison with the alternative approaches Boujelben et al. [14] boundary of the CA = 97.9
mass area
Table 4 is summarising the existing work with respect to
alternative approaches for mass classification in mammograms. Işikli Esener et al. [17] LCP, statistical, CA = 94.67
As discussed in Section 2, the shape of the mass is one of the frequency domain
important factors for the characterisation of benign and malignant Buciu and Gacsadi [18] gabor Az = 0.78
mass in mammograms [6]. In the literature review of this paper, Li et al. [22] subsampled textons CA = 85.96
several methods have been discussed [7, 8, 11–13] that used the Varma and Zisserman [20] traditional textons CA = 70
shape of the mass as a major feature (with other features as texture, proposed approach modified textons CA = 83
intensity etc.) and provided promising results for mammographic
mass classification (benign versus malignant). In clinical practice,
it is not always possible for the boundary of the mass region to be
provided so that the shape features can be extracted and be used for equal to 98% using shape, margin and texture features, however, a
the classification. The current approach of using texture features very low CA was reported using only the texture features (∼60%)
(based on texton modelling) is different from the approaches for the mass classification in mammograms. Similarly, good
presented in the literature review, that used shape features keeping classification results have been reported by Boujelben et al. [14],
into account the problem that the mass segmentation is not always where the boundary information of the mass region has been
available at the classification stage and therefore only the texture of exploited to classify the RoIs as benign or malignant. Işikli Esener
the mass region is used to extract the features. et al. [17] used LCP features in combination with the statistical and
Campos et al. [10] used ICA to extract the features that were frequency domain features and reported a CA equal to 94.67% for
used for classifying the patches extracted from the mammograms. classifying mammographic RoIs as normal, benign or malignant. In
They reported an accuracy of 97.3%, however, the ICA feature their work, they used the masses corresponding to only fatty
extraction seems to be based on all data and no training/testing tissues, whereas the dataset used for the current approach uses
separation is used. In [16], several features have been extracted randomly selected masses that belongs to different tissue densities
from the segmented mass area and a CA of 97.73% has been and not restricted to a particular type of tissue class. Other closely
reported as the best results based on the single fold with average related work to the current approach in the literature is found in
results just above 90%. In [11], the best CA has been reported to be [18], where Gabor wavelets have been used to filter the images and
then PCA was applied to reduce the data dimensionality. By using
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© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2018
only the Gabor wavelets on the images, they reported results in
terms of Az equal to 0.78 for the classification of benign and
malignant masses. The current approach of using various filter
responses in combination with the texton-based approach provided
results in terms of Az equal to 0.89, that is an improvement on the
results achieved by Buciu and Gacsadi [18] using only Gabor
wavelets.
As mentioned in Section 2, texton-based work has been done in
the past for the classification of benign and malignant masses by Li
et al. [22], which showed CA equal to 85.96% that is comparable
to the developed approach.
6 Future directions
In the future, we will examine the effect of using different sizes of
texton dictionary (different number of clusters) to end up with the
best combination of patch size and the size of the texton dictionary
in terms of CA. In the method proposed by Varma and Zisserman
[19], CA improved by increasing the number of clusters, whereas
in the current method at a certain point the classification
performance degraded by increasing the number of clusters.
Further statistical evaluation needs to be performed in order to
explore if the difference between the texton-based approach [19]
and the current patch-based method is significant.
Deep learning is a new area of machine learning and several
techniques have been proposed in the field of CAD system
development [26–28] giving promising results. It should be noted
that deep learning tends to rely on large annotated datasets which
are not always available. In addition, the best results tend to be
obtained using a mixture of deep learning and handcrafted features.
In the presented work, the primary focus was on exploiting
traditional machine learning approaches (and features) for
providing improved results for the classification of benign and
malignant masses. In the future, we will investigate the effects of
using deep learned features in combination with the proposed
feature set (texton histograms) for classifying masses as benign or
malignant using additional data.
7 Conclusions
In conclusion, we have proposed a modified texton-based approach
to classify pre-detected mammographic abnormalities as benign or
malignant. Patches from filter responses were used to make the
texton dictionary and texton frequency histograms from all 53 filter
responses for each RoI were aggregated to form features for
classifying the benign and malignant masses. The developed model
was evaluated on a subset of the DDSM dataset. Results were
comparable to alternative state-of-the-art methods [22].
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© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2018