Digital mammography: Mixed feature neural network with spectral entropy decision for detection of microcalcifications

A computationally efficient mixed feature based neural network (MFNN) is proposed for the detection of microcalcification clusters (MCC's) in digitized mammograms. The MFNN employs features computed in both the spatial and spectral domain and uses spectral entropy as a decision parameter. Backpropagation with Kalman filtering (KF) is employed to allow more efficient network training as required for evaluation of different features, input images, and related error analysis. A previously reported, wavelet-based image-enhancement method is also employed to enhance microcalcification clusters for improved detection. The relative performance of the MFNN for both the raw and enhanced images is evaluated using a common image database of 30 digitized mammograms, with 20 images containing 21 biopsy proven MCC's and ten normal cases. The computed sensitivity (true positive (TP) detection rate) was 90.1% with an average low false positive (FP) detection of 0.71 MCCs/image for the enhanced images using a modified k-fold validation error estimation technique. The corresponding computed sensitivity for the raw images was reduced to 81.4% and with 0.59 FP's MCCs/image. A relative comparison to an earlier neural network (NN) design, using only spatially related features, suggests the importance of the addition of spectral domain features when the raw image data is analyzed.