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International Journal of Engineering & Technology, 7 (4.31) (2018) 322-325
International Journal of Engineering & Technology
Website: www.sciencepubco.com/index.php/IJET
Research paper
HARIRAYA: a Novel Breast Cancer Pseudo-Color Feature for
Multimodal Mammogram using Deep Learning
Azree Shahrel Ahmad Nazri
1
*, Olalekan Agbolade
2
1
Department of Computer Science, FSKTM, UPM
2
Institute Bioscience, UPM
*Corresponding author E-mail: azree@upm.edu.my
Abstract
Breast cancer is the leading cancer in the world. Mammogram is a gold standard for detecting breast cancer at earlier screening because
of its sensitivity. Standard grayscale mammogram images are used by expert radiologists and Computer Aided-Diagnosis (CAD) systems.
Yet, this original x-ray color provides little information to human radiologists and CAD systems to make decision. This binary color code
thus affects sensitivity and specificity of prediction and subsequently affects accuracy. In order to enhance classifier models’ perfor-
mance, this paper proposes a novel feature-level data integration method that combines features from grayscale mammogram and spec-
trum mammogram based on a deep neural network (DNN), called HARIRAYA. Pseudo-color is generated using spectrum color code to
produce Spectrum mammogram from grayscale mammogram. The DNN is trained with three layers: grayscale, false-color and joint fea-
ture representation layers. Empirical results show that the multi-modal DNN model has a better performance in the prediction of malig-
nant breast tissue than single-modal DNN using HARIRAYA features.
Keywords: Breast Cancer; convolutional neural network; mammogram; multi-modal features; false color
1. Introduction
Breast cancers are increasing in the alarming rate worldwide. This
particular type of cancer is the leading cancer among women [1].
Typically breast tissues are characterized by background tissues:
fatty tissues, fatty glandular tissues, and dense glandular tissues.
As for breast cancer tissues, they are divided into two severities of
abnormalities: benign and malignant [2]. Benign tumor cells are
different only slightly in behavior and appearance from their tissue
of origin while Malignant on the other hand describes tissues that
grow rapidly and capable of metastasizing. Both abnormalities are
categorized into six classes: Calcification, Spiculated masses, Ill-
defined masses, Architectural distortion, Well-
defined/circumscribed masses and Asymmetry. The major classes
of abnormalities in breast cancer are calcification and masses [2].
Calcifications grow inside the soft breast tissue as a small lump of
calcium deposits. Masses is typically difficulty to detect due to its
poor exhibition of image contrast [3]. Architectural distortion and
asymmetry are the most difficult tissue abnormalities to detect.
These two abnormalities do not have clear features or characteris-
tics as observables. These problems in detecting tissue abnormali-
ties in both abnormal tumors are great challenge to radiologists
and in medical image processing. The most operative and low-
level ways have been developed by digital mammograms for the
detection of abnormal tumors.
Radiologists mainly use their eyes with the help of breast cancer
diagnostic to discern cancer they screen the mammograms. Yet,
cancer is not easily detected in many cases by the naked eyes as a
result of poor imaging conditions. For instance, the appearance of
unstable and subtle breast cancer on mammogram in their early
stage which may cause the radiologists to misjudge the abnormali-
ty if only diagnosis by experiences is used [2], making the perfor-
mance to vary from 65% to 88%. These challenges faced by hu-
man limitations can partially be overcome by using CAD system
which typically serves as alternative opinion to radiologist. The
major goal of CAD system is to detect and screen the breast tissue
abnormalities with improved accuracy and reliability using com-
puter vision and machine learning approaches. The typical system
flow of CAD system is shown in Figure 1. Several variants of
CAD system for detection of abnormalities have been proposed
and developed. A CAD system that utilized Gabor filters and
undecimated wavelet transform have been suggested [4], [5].
Fig. 1: Block diagram of a CAD system
The extraction of multi-resolutional features which quantify the
mass shapes was performed by the proposition of DWT modulus
maxima technique with wavelet based sub-band image decompo-