Malignant mass detection and classification in radiographic images

Abstract

An image analysis embodiment comprises subsampling a digital image by a subsample factor related to a first anomaly size scale, thereby generating a subsampled image, smoothing the subsampled image to generate a smoothed image, determining a minimum negative second derivative for each pixel in the smoothed image, determining each pixel having a convex down curvature based on a negative minimum negative second derivative value for the respective pixel, joining each eight-neighbor connected pixels having convex down curvature to identify each initial anomaly area, selecting the initial anomaly areas having strongest convex down curvatures based on a respective maximum negative second derivative for each of the initial anomaly areas, extracting one or more classification features for each selected anomaly area, and classifying the selected anomaly areas based on the extracted one or more classification features.