Fractal analysis is useful in digital image processing for the characterization of shape roughness and gray-scale texture or complexity. Breast masses present shape and gray-scale characteristics in mammograms that vary between benign masses and malignant tumors. This book demonstrates the use of fractal analysis to classify breast masses as benign masses or malignant tumors based on the irregularity exhibited in their contours and the gray-scale variability exhibited in their mammographic images. A few different approaches are described to estimate the fractal dimension (FD) of the contour of a mass, including the ruler method, box-counting method, and the power spectral analysis (PSA) method. Procedures are also described for the estimation of the FD of the gray-scale image of a mass using the blanket method and the PSA method. To facilitate comparative analysis of FD as a feature for pattern classification of breast masses, several other shape features and texture measures are described in the book. The shape features described include compactness, spiculation index, fractional concavity, and Fourier factor. The texture measures described are statistical measures derived from the gray-level cooccurrence matrix of the given image. Texture measures reveal properties about the spatial distribution of the gray levels in the given image; therefore, the performance of texture measures may be dependent on the resolution of the image. For this reason, an analysis of the effect of spatial resolution or pixel size on texture measures in the classification of breast masses is presented in the book. The results demonstrated in the book indicate that fractal analysis is more suitable for characterization of the shape than the gray-level variations of breast masses, with area under the receiver operating characteristics of up to 0.93 with a dataset of 111 mammographic images of masses. The methods and results presented in the book are useful for computer-aided diagnosis of breast cancer. Table of Contents: Computer-Aided Diagnosis of Breast Cancer / Detection and Analysis of\newline Breast Masses / Datasets of Images of Breast Masses / Methods for Fractal Analysis / Pattern Classification / Results of Classification of Breast Masses / Concluding Remarks

Fractal analysis is useful in digital image processing for the characterization of shape roughness and gray-scale texture or complexity. Breast masses present shape and gray-scale characteristics in mammograms that vary between benign masses and malignant tumors. This book demonstrates the use of fractal analysis to classify breast masses as benign masses or malignant tumors based on the irregularity exhibited in their contours and the gray-scale variability exhibited in their mammographic images. A few different approaches are described to estimate the fractal dimension (FD) of the contour of a mass, including the ruler method, box-counting method, and the power spectral analysis (PSA) method. Procedures are also described for the estimation of the FD of the gray-scale image of a mass using the blanket method and the PSA method. To facilitate comparative analysis of FD as a feature for pattern classification of breast masses, several other shape features and texture measures are described in the book. The shape features described include compactness, spiculation index, fractional concavity, and Fourier factor. The texture measures described are statistical measures derived from the gray-level cooccurrence matrix of the given image. Texture measures reveal properties about the spatial distribution of the gray levels in the given image; therefore, the performance of texture measures may be dependent on the resolution of the image. For this reason, an analysis of the effect of spatial resolution or pixel size on texture measures in the classification of breast masses is presented in the book. The results demonstrated in the book indicate that fractal analysis is more suitable for characterization of the shape than the gray-level variations of breast masses, with area under the receiver operating characteristics of up to 0.93 with a dataset of 111 mammographic images of masses. The methods and results presented in the book are useful for computer-aided diagnosis of breast cancer. Table of Contents: Computer-Aided Diagnosis of Breast Cancer / Detection and Analysis of\newline Breast Masses / Datasets of Images of Breast Masses / Methods for Fractal Analysis / Pattern Classification / Results of Classification of Breast Masses / Concluding Remarks

Malignant tumors due to breast cancer and masses due to benign disease appear in mammograms with different shape characteristics: the former usually have rough, spiculated, or microlobulated contours, whereas the latter commonly have smooth, round, oval, or macrolobulated contours. Features that characterize shape roughness and complexity can assist in distinguishing between malignant tumors and benign masses. In spite of the established importance of shape factors in the analysis of breast tumors and masses, difficulties exist in obtaining accurate and artifact-free boundaries of the related regions from mammograms. Whereas manually drawn contours could contain artifacts related to hand tremor and are subject to intra-observer and inter-observer variations, automatically detected contours could contain noise and inaccuracies due to limitations or errors in the procedures for the detection and segmentation of the related regions. Modeling procedures are desired to eliminate the artifacts in a given contour, while preserving the important and significant details present in the contour. This book presents polygonal modeling methods that reduce the influence of noise and artifacts while preserving the diagnostically relevant features, in particular the spicules and lobulations in the given contours. In order to facilitate the derivation of features that capture the characteristics of shape roughness of contours of breast masses, methods to derive a signature based on the turning angle function obtained from the polygonal model are described. Methods are also described to derive an index of spiculation, an index characterizing the presence of convex regions, an index characterizing the presence of concave regions, an index of convexity, and a measure of fractal dimension from the turning angle function. Results of testing the methods with a set of 111 contours of 65 benign masses and 46 malignant tumors are presented and discussed. It is shown that shape modeling and analysis can lead to classification accuracy in discriminating between benign masses and malignant tumors, in terms of the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, of up to 0.94. The methods have applications in modeling and analysis of the shape of various types of regions or objects in images, computer vision, computer graphics, and analysis of biomedical images, with particular significance in computer-aided diagnosis of breast cancer. Table of Contents: Analysis of Shape / Polygonal Modeling of Contours / Shape Factors for Pattern Classification / Classification of Breast Masses

Architectural distortion is an important and early sign of breast cancer, but because of its subtlety, it is a common cause of false-negative findings on screening mammograms. Screening mammograms obtained prior to the detection of cancer could contain subtle signs of early stages of breast cancer, in particular, architectural distortion. This book presents image processing and pattern recognition techniques to detect architectural distortion in prior mammograms of interval-cancer cases. The methods are based upon Gabor filters, phase portrait analysis, procedures for the analysis of the angular spread of power, fractal analysis, Laws' texture energy measures derived from geometrically transformed regions of interest (ROIs), and Haralick's texture features. With Gabor filters and phase-portrait analysis, 4,224 ROIs were automatically obtained from 106 prior mammograms of 56 interval-cancer cases, including 301 true-positive ROIs related to architectural distortion, and from 52 mammograms of 13 normal cases. For each ROI, the fractal dimension, the entropy of the angular spread of power, 10 Laws' texture energy measures, and Haralick's 14 texture features were computed. The areas under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves obtained using the features selected by stepwise logistic regression and the leave-one-image-out method are 0.77 with the Bayesian classifier, 0.76 with Fisher linear discriminant analysis, and 0.79 with a neural network classifier. Free-response ROC analysis indicated sensitivities of 0.80 and 0.90 at 5.7 and 8.8 false positives (FPs) per image, respectively, with the Bayesian classifier and the leave-one-image-out method. The present study has demonstrated the ability to detect early signs of breast cancer 15 months ahead of the time of clinical diagnosis, on the average, for interval-cancer cases, with a sensitivity of 0.8 at 5.7 FP/image. The presented computer-aided detection techniques, dedicated to accurate detection and localization of architectural distortion, could lead to efficient detection of early and subtle signs of breast cancer at pre-mass-formation stages. Table of Contents: Introduction / Detection of Early Signs of Breast Cancer / Detection and Analysis of Oriented Patterns / Detection of Potential Sites of Architectural Distortion / Experimental Set Up and Datasets / Feature Selection and Pattern Classification / Analysis of Oriented Patterns Related to Architectural Distortion / Detection of Architectural Distortion in Prior Mammograms / Concluding Remarks

The book is a collection of high-quality peer-reviewed research papers presented in Proceedings of International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Evolutionary Algorithms in Engineering Systems (ICAEES 2014) held at Noorul Islam Centre for Higher Education, Kumaracoil, India. These research papers provide the latest developments in the broad area of use of artificial intelligence and evolutionary algorithms in engineering systems. The book discusses wide variety of industrial, engineering and scientific applications of the emerging techniques. It presents invited papers from the inventors/originators of new applications and advanced technologies.

Computer-aided diagnosis for detection and classification of breast abnormalities on digital mammograms is an active area of research. In recent years, there have been many research developments in all aspects of the mamography. However, it still faces many challenges. The current detection accuracy of lesions such as mass and architectural distortion is considerably low. This research is focused on computerised texture analysis of mass and architectural distortion, and shape analysis of mass in digital mamograms. In texture analysis, we investigate fractal-based methods in texture charectarisation of mammographic masses and architectural distorition. The individual ability of the different fractal-based features in the task of discriminating between abnormal lesion and normal breast parenchyma tissue are evaluated and compared using statistical analysus and receiver operating charectaristics analysis. The statistical analysis shows significant differences in the fractal-based feature between abnormalities and normal breast parenchyma. Results indicate that fractal-based methods are useful in texture feature extraction of mamographic lesions.

The identification and interpretation of the signs of breast cancer in mammographic images from screening programs can be very difficult due to the subtle and diversified appearance of breast disease. This book presents new image processing and pattern recognition techniques for computer-aided detection and diagnosis of breast cancer in its various forms. The main goals are: (1) the identification of bilateral asymmetry as an early sign of breast disease which is not detectable by other existing approaches; and (2) the detection and classification of masses and regions of architectural distortion, as benign lesions or malignant tumors, in a unified framework that does not require accurate extraction of the contours of the lesions. The innovative aspects of the work include the design and validation of landmarking algorithms, automatic Tabár masking procedures, and various feature descriptors for quantification of similarity and for contour independent classification of mammographic lesions. Characterization of breast tissue patterns is achieved by means of multidirectional Gabor filters. For the classification tasks, pattern recognition strategies, including Fisher linear discriminant analysis, Bayesian classifiers, support vector machines, and neural networks are applied using automatic selection of features and cross-validation techniques. Computer-aided detection of bilateral asymmetry resulted in accuracy up to 0.94, with sensitivity and specificity of 1 and 0.88, respectively. Computer-aided diagnosis of automatically detected lesions provided sensitivity of detection of malignant tumors in the range of [0.70, 0.81] at a range of falsely detected tumors of [0.82, 3.47] per image. The techniques presented in this work are effective in detecting and characterizing various mammographic signs of breast disease.