Regularized discriminant analysis for breast mass detection on full field digital mammograms

in computer-aided detection (CAD) applications, an important step is to design a classifier for the differentiation of the abnormal from the normal structures. We have previously developed a stepwise linear discriminant analysis (LDA) method with simplex optimization for this purpose. In this study, our goal was to investigate the performance of a regularized discriminant analysis (RDA) classifier in combination with a feature selection method for classification of the masses and normal tissues detected on full field digital mammograms (FFDM). The feature selection scheme combined a forward stepwise feature selection process and a backward stepwise feature elimination process to obtain the best feature subset. An RDA classifier and an LDA classifier in combination with this new feature selection method were compared to an LDA classifier with stepwise feature selection. A data set of 130 patients containing 260 mammograms; with 130 biopsy-proven masses was used. All cases had two mammographic views. The true locations of the masses were identified by experienced radiologists. To evaluate the performance of the classifiers, we randomly divided the data set into two independent sets of approximately equal size for training and testing. The training and testing were performed using the 2-fold cross validation method. The detection performance of the CAD system was assessed by free response receiver operating characteristic (FROC) analysis. The average test FROC curve was obtained by averaging the FP rates at the same sensitivity along the two corresponding test FROC curves from the 2-fold cross validation. At the case-based sensitivities of 90%, 80% and 70% on the test set, our RDA classifier with the new feature selection scheme achieved an FP rate of 1.8, 1.1, and 0.6 FPs/image, respectively, compared to 2.1, 1.4, and 0.8 FPs/image with stepwise LDA with simplex optimization. Our results indicate that RDA in combination with the sequential forward inclusion-backward elimination feature selection method can improve the performance of mass detection on mammograms. Further work is underway to optimize the feature selection and classification scheme and to evaluate if this approach can be generalized to other CAD classification tasks.