Towards non-data-hungry and fully-automated diagnosis of breast cancer from mammographic images.

Analysing local texture and generating features are two key issues for automatic cancer detection in mammographic images. Recent researches have shown that deep neural networks provide a promising alternative to hand-driven features which suffer from curse of dimensionality and low accuracy rates. However, large and balanced training data are foremost requirements for deep learning-based models and these data are not always available publicly. In this work, we propose a fully-automated method for breast cancer diagnosis that performs training using small sets of data. Feature extraction from mammographic images is performed using a genetic-programming-based descriptor that exploits statistics on a local binary pattern-like local distribution defined in each pixel. The effectiveness of the suggested method is demonstrated on two challenging datasets, (1) the digital database for screening mammography and (2) the mammographic image analysis society digital mammogram database, for content-based image retrieval as well as for abnormality/malignancy classification. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms or achieves comparable results with deep learning-based methods even those with transfer learning and/or data-augmentation.