Studying the Performance of the Computer Aided Detection (CAD) systems for the micro-calcifications detection in digital mammograms

Breast cancer is the most widespread types of cancer among women. An efficient diagnosis in its early stage can give women a better chance of full recovery. Calcification is the important sign for early breast cancer detection. Mammography is the most effective method for breast cancer early detection using low radiation doses. The studies improved the sensitivity of mammogram from 15% to 30% based on Computer Auto-Detection CAD systems, which are used as a “second opinion” to alert the radiologist to structures that, otherwise, might be overlooked. This article summarizes the various methods adopted for micro-calcification cluster detection and compares their performance. Moreover, reasons for the adoption of a common public image database as a test bench for CAD systems, motivations for further CAD tool improvements, and the effectiveness of various CAD systems in a clinical environment are given.

Using Top-Hat and Bottom-Hat Transforms for Contrast Enhancement of Mammograms

Mammography is widely used technique for breast cancer screening. There are various other techniques for breast cancer screening but mammography is the most reliable and effective technique. The images obtained through mammography are of low contrast which causes problem for the radiologists to interpret. Hence, a high quality image is mandatory for the processing of the image for extracting any kind of information. Many contrast enhancement algorithms have been developed over the years. This work presents a method to enhancement Microcalcifications in digitized mammograms. The method is based Mainly on the combination of Image Processing. The top-Hat and bottom–hat transforms are a techniques based on Mathematical morphology operations. This algorithm has been tested on mini-Mias database which have three types of breast tissues . For evaluation of performance of image enhancement algorithm, the Contrast Improvement Index (CII) and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) have been used. Experimental results suggest that algorithm can be improve significantly overall detection of the Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) system especially for dense breast.

Using Decision Tree for Diagnosing Heart Disease Patients

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the world over the past 10 years. Researchers have been using several data mining techniques to help health care professionals in the diagnosis of heart disease. Decision Tree is one of the successful data mining techniques used. However, most research has applied J4.8 Decision Tree, based on Gain Ratio and binary discretization. Gini Index and Information Gain are two other successful types of Decision Trees that are less used in the diagnosis of heart disease. Also other discretization techniques, voting method, and reduced error pruning are known to produce more accurate Decision Trees. This research investigates applying a range of techniques to different types of Decision Trees seeking better performance in heart disease diagnosis. A widely used benchmark data set is used in this research. To evaluate the performance of the alternative Decision Trees the sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy are calculated. The research proposes a model that outperforms J4.8 Decision Tree and Bagging algorithm in the diagnosis of heart disease patients.