Automatic breast density classification using neural network

According to studies, the risk of breast cancer directly associated with breast density. Many researches are done on automatic diagnosis of breast density using mammography. In the current study, artifacts of mammograms are removed by using image processing techniques and by using the method presented in this study, including the diagnosis of points of the pectoral muscle edges and estimating them using regression techniques, pectoral muscle is detected with high accuracy in mammography and breast tissue is fully automatically extracted. In order to classify mammography images into three categories: Fatty, Glandular, Dense, a feature based on difference of gray-levels of hard tissue and soft tissue in mammograms has been used addition to the statistical features and a neural network classifier with a hidden layer. Image database used in this research is the mini-MIAS database and the maximum accuracy of system in classifying images has been reported 97.66% with 8 hidden layers in neural network.