Method for computer-aided detection of clustered microcalcifications

Abstract

A method of computerized detection of clustered microcalcifications in digital mammograms, including obtaining a digitized mammogram, deriving a difference image signal from the digitized mammogram, performing global grey-level thresholding, area filtering, and local grey-level thresholding on the difference image, in that order, performing a texture discrimination of the signal extracted from the previous step, performing a cluster filtering technique on the texture discriminated signals to identify locations in the digitized mammogram corresponding to candidate clustered microcalcifications, performing a feature extraction step in which the area, contrast and background pixel values of signals corresponding to the candidate clustered microcalcifications in the original image are extracted, performing thresholding tests based on the extracted features to eliminate from the candidate clustered microcalcifications particular candidate clustered microcalcification identified as corresponding to false-positive identifications, cluster filtering the remaining candidate clustered microcalcifications to eliminate further candidate clustered microcalcifications which are not sufficiently clustered, and outputting to a radiologist an image indicating, by use of arrows, the positions of the remaining clustered microcalcifications.