**6. Result evaluation**

To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed classification and retrieval-based decision support system, the experiments are performed on mammographic digitized images taken from the Digital Database for Screening Mammography (DDSM), a collaboratively maintained public dataset at the University of South Florida [23]. The DDSM database has been widely used as a benchmark for numerous articles on the mammographic area, for being free of charge and having a diverse quantity of cases. The database contains approximately 2500 cases where each case includes two image view anatomy (CC and MLO) of each breast (right and left). The size of the images varies from 1024 × 300 pixels to 1024 × 800 pixels. The DDSM database offers more than 9000 images and from where we selected a total of 5880 images for experiments and result evaluation.
