Characterization of Breast Tissues in Combined Transforms Domain Using Support Vector Machines

Mammography is a well established imaging technique for showing tissue abnormalities of breast and has been proven to reduce death rate due to breast cancer in screened populations of women. The proposed method classifies the breast tissues according to severity of abnormality (benign or malign) using combined transforms domain features. In this paper two such domains are explored, Discrete Cosine Transform - Discrete Wavelet Transform (DCT-DWT) and Discrete Cosine Transform - Stationary Wavelet Transform (DCT-SWT). The method is tested on 221 mammogram images from the MIAS database. The combined transform domain features proves to be a promising tool for precise classification with SVM classifier. The DCT-DWT domain yields 96.26% accuracy for discrimination between normal-malign samples comparing to DCT-SWT which gives 93.14%. The novelty of the proposed method is demonstrated by comparing with nearest neighbor classification technique.