Detection of Partially Overlapped Masses in Mammograms

Breast cancer remains one of the major causes of cancer deaths among women. For decades, screening mammography has been one of the most common methods for early cancer detection and diagnosis. Digital mammography images are created by applying a small burst of x-rays that pass through the breast to a solid-state detector, which transmits the electronic signals to a computer to form a digital image. However, due to projection, some mass areas may be partially covered, which makes them difficult to be interprated. This paper addresses the issue of potential mass regions being distorted by other normal breast tissues, which will negatively affect some of the features being extracted from the mass and in turn deteriorate the classification accuracy. The goal was to estimate the overlapped parts of the mass border using Euclidean distance in order to give more accurate results in next stages. The presented method achieved 95.744% region sensitivity at 0.333 False Positive per Image (FPI), outperforming other researches in this branch of mammography analysis.