RESUMO
Female breast cancer is the second most common cancer in the world. Several efforts in artificial intelligence have been made to help improving the diagnostic accuracy at earlier stages. However, the identification of breast abnormalities, like masses, on mammographic images is not a trivial task, especially for dense breasts. In this paper we describe our novel mass detection process that includes three successive steps of enhancement, characterization and classification. The proposed enhancement system is based mainly on the analysis of the breast texture. First of all, a filtering step with morphological operators and soft thresholding is achieved. Then, we remove from the filtered breast region, all the details that may interfere with the eventual masses, including pectoral muscle and galactophorous tree. The pixels belonging to this tree will be interpolated and replaced by the average of the neighborhood. In the characterization process, measurement of the Gaussian density in the wavelet domain allows the segmentation of the masses. Finally, a comparative classification mechanism based on the Bayesian regularization back-propagation networks and ANFIS techniques is proposed. The tests were conducted on the MIAS database. The results showed the robustness of the proposed enhancement method.