Automated System for Early Breast Cancer Detection in Mammograms

The increasing demand on mammographic screening for early breast cancer detection, and the subtlety of early breast cancer signs on mammograms, suggest an automated image processing system that can serve as a diagnostic aid in radiology clinics. We present a fully automated algorithm for detecting clusters of microcalcifications that are the most common signs of early, potentially curable breast cancer. By using the contour map of the mammogram, the algorithm circumvents some of the difficulties encountered with standard image processing methods. The clinical implementation of an automated instrument based on this algorithm is also discussed

Breast Cancer: Modelling and Detection

This paper reviews a number of the mathematical models used in cancer modelling and then chooses a specific cancer, breast carcinoma, to illustrate how the modelling can be used in aiding detection. We then discuss mathematical models that underpin mammographic image analysis, which complements models of tumour growth and facilitates diagnosis and treatment of cancer. Mammographic images are notoriously difficult to interpret, and we give an overview of the primary image enhancement technologies that have been introduced, before focusing on a more detailed description of some of our own recent work on the use of physics-based modelling in mammography. This theoretical approach to image analysis yields a wealth of information that could be incorporated into the mathematical models, and we conclude by describing how current mathematical models might be enhanced by use of this information, and how these models in turn will help to meet some of the major challenges in cancer detection

Digital mammography, cancer screening: Factors important for image compression

The use of digital mammography for breast cancer screening poses several novel problems such as development of digital sensors, computer assisted diagnosis (CAD) methods for image noise suppression, enhancement, and pattern recognition, compression algorithms for image storage, transmission, and remote diagnosis. X-ray digital mammography using novel direct digital detection schemes or film digitizers results in large data sets and, therefore, image compression methods will play a significant role in the image processing and analysis by CAD techniques. In view of the extensive compression required, the relative merit of 'virtually lossless' versus lossy methods should be determined. A brief overview is presented here of the developments of digital sensors, CAD, and compression methods currently proposed and tested for mammography. The objective of the NCI/NASA Working Group on Digital Mammography is to stimulate the interest of the image processing and compression scientific community for this medical application and identify possible dual use technologies within the NASA centers

Medical imaging analysis with artificial neural networks

Given that neural networks have been widely reported in the research community of medical imaging, we provide a focused literature survey on recent neural network developments in computer-aided diagnosis, medical image segmentation and edge detection towards visual content analysis, and medical image registration for its pre-processing and post-processing, with the aims of increasing awareness of how neural networks can be applied to these areas and to provide a foundation for further research and practical development. Representative techniques and algorithms are explained in detail to provide inspiring examples illustrating: (i) how a known neural network with fixed structure and training procedure could be applied to resolve a medical imaging problem; (ii) how medical images could be analysed, processed, and characterised by neural networks; and (iii) how neural networks could be expanded further to resolve problems relevant to medical imaging. In the concluding section, a highlight of comparisons among many neural network applications is included to provide a global view on computational intelligence with neural networks in medical imaging

Improvement for detection of microcalcifications through clustering algorithms and artificial neural networks

A new method for detecting microcalcifications in regions of interest (ROIs) extracted from digitized mammograms is proposed. The top-hat transform is a technique based on mathematical morphology operations and, in this paper, is used to perform contrast enhancement of the mi-crocalcifications. To improve microcalcification detection, a novel image sub-segmentation approach based on the possibilistic fuzzy c-means algorithm is used. From the original ROIs, window-based features, such as the mean and standard deviation, were extracted; these features were used as an input vector in a classifier. The classifier is based on an artificial neural network to identify patterns belonging to microcalcifications and healthy tissue. Our results show that the proposed method is a good alternative for automatically detecting microcalcifications, because this stage is an important part of early breast cancer detectio

Convolutional Neural Networks for the segmentation of microcalcification in Mammography Imaging

Cluster of microcalcifications can be an early sign of breast cancer. In this paper we propose a novel approach based on convolutional neural networks for the detection and segmentation of microcalcification clusters. In this work we used 283 mammograms to train and validate our model, obtaining an accuracy of 98.22% in the detection of preliminary suspect regions and of 97.47% in the segmentation task. Our results show how deep learning could be an effective tool to effectively support radiologists during mammograms examination.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figure

Fuzzy technique for microcalcifications clustering in digital mammograms

Background Mammography has established itself as the most efficient technique for the identification of the pathological breast lesions. Among the various types of lesions, microcalcifications are the most difficult to identify since they are quite small (0.1-1.0 mm) and often poorly contrasted against an images background. Within this context, the Computer Aided Detection (CAD) systems could turn out to be very useful in breast cancer control. Methods In this paper we present a potentially powerful microcalcifications cluster enhancement method applicable to digital mammograms. The segmentation phase employs a form filter, obtained from LoG filter, to overcome the dependence from target dimensions and to optimize the recognition efficiency. A clustering method, based on a Fuzzy C-means (FCM), has been developed. The described method, Fuzzy C-means with Features (FCM-WF), was tested on simulated clusters of microcalcifications, implying that the location of the cluster within the breast and the exact number of microcalcifications are known.The proposed method has been also tested on a set of images from the mini-Mammographic database provided by Mammographic Image Analysis Society (MIAS) publicly available. Results The comparison between FCM-WF and standard FCM algorithms, applied on both databases, shows that the former produces better microcalcifications associations for clustering than the latter: with respect to the private and the public database we had a performance improvement of 10% and 5% with regard to the Merit Figure and a 22% and a 10% of reduction of false positives potentially identified in the images, both to the benefit of the FCM-WF. The method was also evaluated in terms of Sensitivity (93% and 82%), Accuracy (95% and 94%), FP/image (4% for both database) and Precision (62% and 65%). Conclusions Thanks to the private database and to the informations contained in it regarding every single microcalcification, we tested the developed clustering method with great accuracy. In particular we verified that 70% of the injected clusters of the private database remained unaffected if the reconstruction is performed with the FCM-WF. Testing the method on the MIAS databases allowed also to verify the segmentation properties of the algorithm, showing that 80% of pathological clusters remained unaffected

Computer aided system for segmentation and visualization of microcalcifications in digital mammograms.

Two methods for segmentation and visualization of microcalcifications in digital or digitized mammograms are described. First method is based on modern mathematical morphology, while the second one uses the multifractal approach. In the first method, by using an appropriate combination of some morphological operations, high local contrast enhancement, followed by significant suppression of background tissue, irrespective of its radiology density, is obtained. By iterative procedure, this method highly emphasizes only small bright details, possible microcalcifications. In a multifractal approach, from initial mammogram image, a corresponding multifractal "images" are created, from which a radiologist has a freedom to change the level of segmentation. An appropriate user friendly computer aided visualization (CAV) system with embedded two methods is realized. The interactive approach enables the physician to control the level and the quality of segmentation. Suggested methods were tested through mammograms from MIAS database as a gold standard, and from clinical praxis, using digitized films and digital images from full field digital mammograph