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…