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…