Mammographic mass classification according to Bi-RADS lexicon

The goal of this study is to propose a computer-aided diagnosis system to differentiate between four breast imaging reporting and data system (Bi-RADS) classes in digitised mammograms. This system is inspired by the approach of the doctor during the radiologic examination as it was agreed in BI-RADS, where masses are described by their form, their boundary and their density. The segmentation of masses in the authors' approach is manual because it is supposed that the detection is already made. When the segmented region is available, the features extraction process can be carried out. 22 visual characteristics are automatically computed from shape, edge and textural properties; only one human feature is used in this study, which is the patient's age. Classification is finally done using a multi-layer perceptron according to two separate schemes; the first one consists of classify masses to distinguish between the four BI-RADS classes (2, 3, 4 and 5). In the second one the authors classify abnormalities on two classes (benign and malign). The proposed approach has been evaluated on 480 mammographic masses extracted from the digital database for screening mammography, and the obtained results are encouraging.