ASSOCIATIVE CLASSIFICATION OF MAMMOGRAMS BASED ON PARALLEL MINING OF IMAGE BLOCKS

One of the main objectives of data mining as a promising multidisciplinary field in computer science is to provide a classification model to be used for decision support purposes. In the medical imaging domain, mammograms classification is a difficult diagnostic task which calls for development of automated classification systems. Associative classification, as a special case of association rules mining, has been adopted in classification problems for years. In this paper, an associative classification framework based on parallel mining of image blocks is proposed to be used for mammograms discrimination. Indeed, association rules mining is applied to a commonly used mammography image database to classify digital mammograms into three categories, namely normal, benign and malign. In order to do so, first images are preprocessed and then features are extracted from non-overlapping image blocks and discretized for rule discovery. Association rules are then discovered through parallel mining of transactional databases which correspond to the image blocks, and finally are used within a unique decision-making scheme to predict the class of unknown samples. Finally, experiments are conducted to assess the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Results show that the proposed framework proved successful in terms of accuracy, precision, and recall, and suggest that the framework could be used as the core of any future associative classifier to support mammograms discrimination.