Breast Cancer Detection using Crow Search Optimization based Intuitionistic Fuzzy Clustering with Neighborhood Attraction

OBJECTIVE: Generally, medical images contain lots of noise that may lead to uncertainty in diagnosing the abnormalities. Computer aided diagnosis systems offer a support to the radiologists in identifying the disease affected area. In mammographic images, some normal tissues may appear to be similar to masses and it is tedious to differentiate them. Therefore, this paper presents a novel framework for the detection of mammographic masses that leads to early diagnosis of breast cancer. METHODS: This work proposes a Crow search optimization based Intuitionistic fuzzy clustering approach with neighborhood attraction (CrSA-IFCM-NA) for identifying the region of interest. First order moments were extracted from preprocessed images. These features were given as input to the Intuitionistic fuzzy clustering algorithm. Instead of randomly selecting the initial centroids, crow search optimization technique is applied to choose the best initial centroid and the masses are separated. Experiments are conducted over the images taken from the Mammographic Image Analysis Society (mini-MIAS) database. RESULTS: CrSA-IFCM-NA effectively separated the masses from mammogram images and proved to have good results in terms of cluster validity indices indicating the clear segmentation of the regions. CONCLUSION: The experimental results show that the accuracy of the proposed method proves to be encouraging for detection of masses. Thus, it provides a better assistance to the radiologists in diagnosing breast cancer at an early stage.