Hybrid technique for the detection of suspicious lesions in digital mammograms

This paper presents an efficient system for the detection of suspicious lesions in mammograms. The proposed detection system consists of three steps. In the first step, an efficient pre-processing technique is developed using Top-Hat morphological filter and NL means filter. In the second step, threshold selection procedure is developed using a combination of Fuzzy C-means (FCM), gradient magnitude (GM), and intensity contrast (IC). Finally, computed threshold is used to extract the suspicious lesions in mammograms. The Free Response Operating Characteristics (FROC) curve is used to assess the performance of the proposed system. Proposed system achieved the sensitivity of 93.8% at the rate of 0.51 false positives per image.