Multi-criterion mammographic risk analysis supported with multi-label fuzzy-rough feature selection.

CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND: Breast cancer is one of the most common diseases threatening the human lives globally, requiring effective and early risk analysis for which learning classifiers supported with automated feature selection offer a potential robust solution.

MOTIVATION: Computer aided risk analysis of breast cancer typically works with a set of extracted mammographic features which may contain significant redundancy and noise, thereby requiring technical developments to improve runtime performance in both computational efficiency and classification accuracy.

HYPOTHESIS: Use of advanced feature selection methods based on multiple diagnosis criteria may lead to improved results for mammographic risk analysis.

METHODS: An approach for multi-criterion based mammographic risk analysis is proposed, by adapting the recently developed multi-label fuzzy-rough feature selection mechanism.

RESULTS: A system for multi-criterion mammographic risk analysis is implemented with the aid of multi-label fuzzy-rough feature selection and its performance is positively verified experimentally, in comparison with representative popular mechanisms.

CONCLUSIONS: The novel approach for mammographic risk analysis based on multiple criteria helps improve classification accuracy using selected informative features, without suffering from the redundancy caused by such complex criteria, with the implemented system demonstrating practical efficacy.