Effect of Pectoral Muscles on CNN based Mammographic Cancer Detection

Cancer is attributed to abnormal growth of tissue cells in any part of the living body. The number of cancer patients is increasing worldwide. The reason of the development of abnormal cells within the body is still unknown to the researchers. The most common is breast cancer and it is affective affecting one out of every ten women. The reason of breast lesions formation may be calcification or mass deposit and digital mammography is generally used for verifying it. It is a cheap, non-toxic, and user-friendly test, but needs expert opinion for ascertaining the presence of cancer. The accuracy of mammographic detection varies between 80% and 90%. Recently, Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown their application in automatic detection of the cancer, but inclusion of pectoral muscle in the mammogram reduces the efficiency of the CNN system as the texture of the muscle resembles with cancerous tissues. Further, CNN based detection requires high resolution images which in turn requires state of art technology-based machines, generally, not available in rural area-based clinics. The focus of the proposed research is to investigate effect of low-quality blurred input mammograms on the detection of pectoral muscle boundary, so that the pectoral muscle removed mammograms can be applied to CNN system for automatic prediction of cancerous images. The investigations carried out have shown that low quality blurred images can also be employed for detecting cancerous tissues provided the pectoral muscle is removed from the mammograms before using CNN based classifier.