Classification of breast tissues using Moran's index and Geary's coefficient as texture signatures and SVM

Female breast cancer is the major cause of cancer-related deaths in western countries. Efforts in computer vision have been made in order to help improving the diagnostic accuracy by radiologists. In this paper, we present a methodology that uses Moran's index and Geary's coefficient measures in breast tissues extracted from mammogram images. These measures are used as input features for a support vector machine classifier with the purpose of distinguishing tissues between normal and abnormal cases as well as classifying them into benign and malignant cancerous cases. The use of both proposed techniques showed to be very promising, since we obtained an accuracy of 96.04% and Az ROC of 0.946 with Geary's coefficient and an accuracy of 99.39% and Az ROC of 1 with Moran's index to discriminate tissues in mammograms as normal or abnormal. We also obtained accuracy of 88.31% and Az ROC of 0.804 with Geary's coefficient and accuracy of 87.80% and Az ROC of 0.89 with Moran's index to discriminate tissues in mammograms as benign and malignant. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.