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

Integral invariants for image enhancement

Medical images pose a major challenge for image analysis: often they have poor signal-to-noise, necessitating smoothing; yet such smoothing needs to preserve the boundaries of regions of interest and small features such as mammogram microcalcifications. We show how circular integral invariants (II) may be adapted for feature-preserving smoothing to facilitate segmentation. Though II is isotropic, we show that it leads to considerably less feature deterioration than Gaussian blurring and it improves segmentation of regions of interest as compared to anisotropic diffusion, particularly for hierarchical contour based segmentation methods

Computer aided detection in mammography

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 201

An Anisotropic Diffusion Approach for Early Detection of Breast Cancer

International audienceThe prevalence of breast cancer in the modern world has motivated the development of new tools to assist radiologists in their quest to detect malignancy as early as possible. Following the successful introduction of the screening programmes, science must provide effective clinical methods to detect cancer and improve life expectancy. Considerable research has been undertaken to this end, but the results still lack the robustness necessary for routine clinical applications. Mammographic images are difficult to interpret even by radiologists and this makes their task error prone. This paper presents a new approach to filtering breast images, which highlights the structures of anatomical interest. A method to detect calcifications has been explored. The approach is based on an edge preserving filtering with anisotropic diffusion. The algorithm makes use of the advantages offered by the hint images, a normalised physical-based representation of the breast. The results are promising with excellent true positive rates in both detection of isolated coarse calcifications and microcalcifications with a very low number of false positives per image

Characterization of mammographic masses based on level set segmentation with new image features and patient information

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/134904/1/mp0630.pd