Rough Morphology Hybrid Approach for Mammography Image Classification and Prediction

The objective of this research is to illustrate how rough sets can be successfully integrated with mathematical morphology and provide a more effective hybrid approach to resolve medical imaging problems. Hybridization of rough sets and mathematical morphology techniques has been applied to depict their ability to improve the classification of breast cancer images into two outcomes: malignant or benign cancer. Algorithms based on mathematical morphology are first applied to enhance the contrast of the whole original image; to extract the region of interest and to enhance the edges surrounding that region. Then, features are extracted characterizing the underlying texture of the regions of interest by using the gray-level co-occurrence matrix. The rough set approach to attribute reduction and rule generation is further presented. Finally, rough morphology is designed for discrimination of different regions of interest to test whether they represent malignant cancer or benign cancer. To evaluate performance of the presented rough morphology approach, we tested different mammogram images. The experimental results illustrate that the overall performance in locating optimal orientation offered by the proposed approach is high compared with other hybrid systems such as rough-neural and rough-fuzzy systems.