A computer-aided system for efficient grading of breast cancer from histopathological images

Breast cancer (BC) is one of the most commonly reported health issues worldwide, especially in females. Early detection and diagnosis of BC can greatly reduce mortality rates. Samples obtained with different imaging methods such as mammography, computerized tomography, magnetic resonance, ultrasound, and biopsy are used in the diagnosis of BC. Histopathological images obtained from a biopsy contain vital information about the stage of the BC. Computer-aided systems are important tools to assist pathologists in the early detection of BC. In the current study, the use of gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) of Shearlet Transform (ST) coefficients were first scrutinized as textural features. ST is an advanced decomposition-based method that can analyze images in various directions and is sensitive to edge singularities. These features make ST more robust than other decomposition methods such as Fourier and wavelet. Color channel histogram features were also utilized for a second level of evaluation in the diagnosis of the BC stage. These features are considered one of the most important building blocks that pathologists consider in the course of grading histopathological images. Then, by combining these two properties, the classification results were evaluated with various machine learning classifiers. The assessments were performed on a BreaKHis dataset containing benign and malignant histopathological samples. The obtained results were considered to be encouraging.