Multi-scale mass segmentation for mammograms via cascaded random forests

Breast mass detection and segmentation are difficult tasks due to the variation in size and shape of breast masses. Constructing classifiers for this problem is also challenging due to the fact that normal tissue regions overwhelmingly outnumber abnormal regions. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for detecting and segmenting breast masses in mammography based on multi-scale morphological filtering and a self-adaptive cascade of random forests (CasRFs). CasRFs can cope with severe class imbalance by adding layers to the cascade until a minimum number of false-positives (FPs) is reached. The approach achieves an average sensitivity of 0.94 with 1.99 FPs/image on INbreast and a sensitivity of 0.77 with 3.93 FPs/image on DDSM BCRP.