1,554 research outputs found
A Computer Aided Detection system for mammographic images implemented on a GRID infrastructure
The use of an automatic system for the analysis of mammographic images has
proven to be very useful to radiologists in the investigation of breast cancer,
especially in the framework of mammographic-screening programs. A breast
neoplasia is often marked by the presence of microcalcification clusters and
massive lesions in the mammogram: hence the need for tools able to recognize
such lesions at an early stage. In the framework of the GPCALMA (GRID Platform
for Computer Assisted Library for MAmmography) project, the co-working of
italian physicists and radiologists built a large distributed database of
digitized mammographic images (about 5500 images corresponding to 1650
patients) and developed a CAD (Computer Aided Detection) system, able to make
an automatic search of massive lesions and microcalcification clusters. The CAD
is implemented in the GPCALMA integrated station, which can be used also for
digitization, as archive and to perform statistical analyses. Some GPCALMA
integrated stations have already been implemented and are currently on clinical
trial in some italian hospitals. The emerging GRID technology can been used to
connect the GPCALMA integrated stations operating in different medical centers.
The GRID approach will support an effective tele- and co-working between
radiologists, cancer specialists and epidemiology experts by allowing remote
image analysis and interactive online diagnosis.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, to appear in the Proceedings of the 13th
IEEE-NPSS Real Time Conference 2003, Montreal, Canada, May 18-23 200
A New Computer-Aided Diagnosis System with Modified Genetic Feature Selection for BI-RADS Classification of Breast Masses in Mammograms
Mammography remains the most prevalent imaging tool for early breast cancer
screening. The language used to describe abnormalities in mammographic reports
is based on the breast Imaging Reporting and Data System (BI-RADS). Assigning a
correct BI-RADS category to each examined mammogram is a strenuous and
challenging task for even experts. This paper proposes a new and effective
computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system to classify mammographic masses into four
assessment categories in BI-RADS. The mass regions are first enhanced by means
of histogram equalization and then semiautomatically segmented based on the
region growing technique. A total of 130 handcrafted BI-RADS features are then
extrcated from the shape, margin, and density of each mass, together with the
mass size and the patient's age, as mentioned in BI-RADS mammography. Then, a
modified feature selection method based on the genetic algorithm (GA) is
proposed to select the most clinically significant BI-RADS features. Finally, a
back-propagation neural network (BPN) is employed for classification, and its
accuracy is used as the fitness in GA. A set of 500 mammogram images from the
digital database of screening mammography (DDSM) is used for evaluation. Our
system achieves classification accuracy, positive predictive value, negative
predictive value, and Matthews correlation coefficient of 84.5%, 84.4%, 94.8%,
and 79.3%, respectively. To our best knowledge, this is the best current result
for BI-RADS classification of breast masses in mammography, which makes the
proposed system promising to support radiologists for deciding proper patient
management based on the automatically assigned BI-RADS categories
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
MammoApplet: an interactive Java applet tool for manual annotation in medical imaging
Web-based applications in computational medicine have become increasingly important during the last years. The rapid growth of the World Wide Web supposes a new paradigm in the telemedicine and eHealth areas in order to assist and enhance the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of patients. Furthermore, training of radiologists and management of medical databases are also becoming increasingly important issues in the field. In this paper, we present MammoApplet , an interactive Java applet interface designed as a web-based tool. It aims to facilitate the diagnosis of new mammographic cases by providing a set of image processing tools that allow a better visualization of the images, and a set of drawing tools, used to annotate the suspicious regions. Each annotation allows including the attributes considered by the experts when issuing the final diagnosis. The overall set of overlays is stored in a database as XML files associated with the original images. The final goal is to obtain a database of already diagnosed cases for training and enhancing the performance of novice radiologistsPeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
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