Full Automatic Classification of Suspicious Areas in Breast Thermo Images for Early Cancer Detection

Lashkari, Amir Ehsan; Pak, Fatemeh; Firouzmand, Mohammad

doi:10.22041/ijbme.2016.15856

Full Automatic Classification of Suspicious Areas in Breast Thermo Images for Early Cancer Detection

Document Type : Full Research Paper

Authors

Amir Ehsan Lashkari ¹

Fatemeh Pak ²

Mohammad Firouzmand ³

¹ Ph.D, Department of Bio-Medical Engineering, Institute of Electrical Engineering & Information Technology, Iranian Research Organization for Science and Technology (IROST), Tehran, Iran

² Colleague, Department of Bio-Medical Engineering, Institute of Electrical Engineering & Information Technology, Iranian Research Organization for Science and Technology (IROST), Tehran, Iran

³ Assistant Professor, Department of Bio-Medical Engineering, Institute of Electrical Engineering & Information Technology, Iranian Research Organization for Science and Technology (IROST), Tehran, Iran

https://doi.org/10.22041/ijbme.2016.15856

Abstract

Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer among women. The important key to treat the breast cancer is early detection of it because according to many pathological studies more 80% of all abnormalities are still benign at primary stages; so in recent years, many studies and extensive research done to early detection of breast cancer with higher precision and accuracy. Infra-red breast thermography is an imaging technique based on recording temperature distribution patterns of breast tissue. Compared with breast mammography technique, thermography is more suitable technique because it is noninvasive, non-contact, passive and free ionizing radiation. In this paper, a full automatic high accuracy technique for classification of suspicious areas in thermogram images with the aim of assisting physicians in early detection of breast cancer has been presented. Proposed algorithm consists of four main steps: pre-processing & segmentation, feature extraction, feature selection and classification. At the first step, using full automatic operation, region of interest (ROI) determined and the quality of image improved. Using thresholding and edge detection techniques, both right and left breasts separated from each other. Then relative suspected areas become segmented and image matrix normalized due to the uniqueness of each person's body temperature. At feature extraction stage, 23 features, including statistical, morphological, frequency domain, histogram and Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) based features are extracted from segmented right and left breast obtained from step 1. To achieve the best features, feature selection methods such as mRMR, SFS, SBS, SFFS, SFBS and GA have been used at step 3. Finally to classify and TH labeling procedures, different classifiers such as AdaBoost, SVM, kNN, NB and PNN are assessed to find the best suitable one. The results obtained on native database showed the best and significant performance of the proposed algorithm in comprise to the similar studies. According to experimental results, mRMR combined with AdaBoost with the maximum accuracy of 92%, and SFFS combined with AdaBoost with a maximum accuracy of 88%, are the best combination of feature selection and classifier for evaluation of the right and left breast images respectively.

Keywords

Breast cancer

Breast Thermography

Thermogram

feature selection

Classification

Subjects

Biomedical Image Processing / Medical Image Processing

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