Comparative Evaluation of classifiers and Feature Selection Methods for Mass Screening in Digitized Mammograms

In this paper, three groups of characteristics related to mass texture are adopted, namely, SGLD (spatial gray level dependence), TS (texture spectrum) and TFCM (texture feature coding method) to describe the characteristics of masses and normal textures on digitized mammograms. Next, under the testing by classifiers, three feature selection methods - SBS (sequential backward selection), SFS (sequential forward selection) and SFSM (sequential floating search method) are used to find out suboptimal subset from 19 features in order to improve the performance of mass detection. Finally, two classifiers PNN (probabilistic neural network) and SVM (support vector machine) are applied and their performances are compared