Abstract
A computer-aided diagnosis scheme to assist radiologists in detecting clustered microcalcifications from mammograms is being developed. Starting with a digital mammogram, the scheme consists of three steps. First, the image is filtered so that the signal-to-noise ratio of microcalcifications is increased by suppression of the normal background structure of the breast. Secondly, potential microcalcifications are extracted from the filtered image with a series of three different techniques: a global thresholding based on the grey-level histogram of the full filtered image, an erosion operator for eliminating very small signals, and a local adaptive grey-level thresholding. Thirdly, some false-positive signals are eliminated by means of a texture analysis technique, and a non-linear clustering algorithm is then used for grouping the remaining signals. With this method, the scheme can detect approximately 85% of true clusters, with an average of two false clusters detected per image.
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Nishikawa, R.M., Giger, M.L., Doi, K. et al. Computer-aided detection of clustered microcalcifications on digital mammograms. Med. Biol. Eng. Comput. 33, 174–178 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02523037
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02523037