Matching mammographic regions in mediolateral oblique and cranio caudal views: a probabilistic approach

Most of the current CAD systems detect suspicious mass regions independently in single views. In this paper we present a method to match corresponding regions in mediolateral oblique (MLO) and craniocaudal (CC) mammographic views of the breast. For every possible combination of mass regions in the MLO view and CC view, a number of features are computed, such as the difference in distance of a region to the nipple, a texture similarity measure, the gray scale correlation and the likelihood of malignancy of both regions computed by single-view analysis. In previous research, Linear Discriminant Analysis was used to discriminate between correct and incorrect links. In this paper we investigate if the performance can be improved by employing a statistical method in which four classes are distinguished. These four classes are defined by the combinations of view (MLO/CC) and pathology (TP/FP) labels. We use distance-weighted k-Nearest Neighbor density estimation to estimate the likelihood of a region combination. Next, a correspondence score is calculated as the likelihood that the region combination is a TP-TP link. The method was tested on 412 cases with a malignant lesion visible in at least one of the views. In 82.4% of the cases a correct link could be established between the TP detections in both views. In future work, we will use the framework presented here to develop a context dependent region matching scheme, which takes the number and likelihood of possible alternatives into account. It is expected that more accurate determination of matching probabilities will lead to improved CAD performance.