An Integrated Approach to Stage 1 Breast Cancer Detection

We present an automated, end-to-end approach for Stage 1 breast cancer detection. The first phase of our proposed work-flow takes individual digital mammograms as input and outputs several smaller sub-images from which the background has been removed. Next, we extract a set of features which capture textural information from the segmented images. In the final phase, the most salient of these features are fed into a Multi-Objective Genetic Programming system which then evolves classifiers capable of identifying those segments which may have suspicious areas that require further investigation. A key aspect of this work is the examination of several new experimental configurations which focus on textural asymmetry between breasts. The best evolved classifier using such a configuration can deliver results of 100% accuracy on true positives and a false positive per image rating of just 0.33, which is better than the current state of the art.