Detection of Breast Cancer from Calcium Particles in Mammography Using Fuzzy Clustering and Neural Networks

Detection of calcium particles in breast mammography images is important in the early detection of cancer. Identification of these particles is done manually by experts, which is associated with high cost and error. In this paper, a new method based on fuzzy clustering algorithm for fine-grained detection in mammographic images is proposed. In the proposed method, the low quality of mammographic images is improved with the help of preprocessing. By defining an appropriate membership function in fuzzy clustering, fine-grained regions are identified. Finally, the identified areas were classified into benign and malignant groups with the help of forward propagation neural network with error propagation training algorithm. The accuracy of identification of the desired area is 96.79% and the sensitivity of this identification is 97.20%. Compared to the previous method, the accuracy and sensitivity of fine-grained identification has been improved (95% of the desired area identification accuracy and 90.52% sensitivity).  In the classification of areas with the help of neural network, the accuracy was 97.5%. Evaluation criteria showed the superiority of the proposed method in the extraction of calcium particles and classification. The reason for the superiority of the proposed method is the high accuracy in extracting the desired area as well as the distinctive features extracted from the desired area.