A massive lesion detection algorithm in mammography
A new algorithm for massive lesion detection in mammography is presented. The algorithm consists in three main steps : 1) reduction of the dimension of the image to be processed through the identifi cation of regions of interest (rois) as candidates for massive lesions ; 2) characterization of the roi by means of suitable feature extraction ; 3) pattern classifi cation through supervised neural networks. Suspect regions are detected by searching for local maxima of the pixel grey level intensity. A ring of increasing radius, centered on a maximum, is considered until the mean intensity in the ring decreases to a defi ned fraction of the maximum. The rois thus obtained are described by avera…
GPCALMA: An Italian mammographic database of digitized images for research
In this work the implementation of a database of digitized mammograms is described. The digitized images were collected since 1999 by a community of physicists in collaboration with radiologists in several Italian hospitals, as a first step in order to develop and implement a Computer Aided Detection (CAD) system. 3369 mammograms were collected from 967 patients; they were classified according to the type and the morphology of the lesions, the type of the breast tissue and the type of pathologies. A dedicated Graphical User Interface was developed for mammography visualization and processing, in order to support the medical diagnosis directly on a high-resolution screen. The database has be…