Computer aided diagnosis of breast cancer in digitized mammograms.

A computer aided neural network classification of regions of suspicion (ROS) on digitized mammograms is presented in this paper which employs features extracted by a new technique based on independent component analysis. Our approach is concentrated in finding a set of independent source regions that generate the observed mammograms. The coefficients of the linear transformation of the source regions are used as features that describe effectively any normal and abnormal region in digital mammograms as well as benign and malignant ROS in the latter case. Extensive experiments in the MIAS Database have shown a recognition accuracy of 88.23% in the detection of all kinds of abnormalities and 79.31% in the task of distinguishing between benign and malignant regions, outperforming in both cases standard textural features, widely used for cancer detection in mammograms.