Mass Classification in Mammogram with Semi-Supervised Relief Based Feature Selection

Mammogram is currently the best way for early detection of breast cancer. Mass is a typical sign of breast cancer, and the classification of masses as malignant or benign may assist radiologists in reducing the biopsy rate without increasing false negatives. Typically, different geometry and texture features are extracted and utilized to train a classifier to classify a mass. However, not each feature is equally important for a classifier, and some features may indeed decrease the performance of a classifier. In this paper, we investigated the usage of semi-supervised feature selection method for classification. After a mass is extracted from a ROI (region of interest) with level set method. Morphological and texture features are extracted from the segmented regions and surrounding regions. SSLFE (Semi-Supervised Local Feature Extraction, proposed in our previous work) is utilized to select important features for KNN classifier. Mammography images from DDSM were used for experiment. The experimental result shows that by incorporating information embedded in unlabeled data, SSLFE can improve the performance compared to the method without feature selection and traditional Relief method.