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U.S. Department of Energy
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Automated analysis for microcalcifications in high resolution digital mammograms

Conference ·
OSTI ID:32784
Digital mammography offers the promise of significant advances in early detection of breast cancer. Our overall goal is to design a digital system which improves upon every aspect of current mammography technology: the x-ray source, detector, visual presentation of the mammogram and computer-aided diagnosis capabilities. This paper will discuss one part of our whole-system approach -- the development of a computer algorithm using gray-scale morphology to automatically analyze and flag microcalcifications in digital mammograms in hopes of reducing the current percentage of false-negative diagnoses, which is estimated at 20%. The mammograms used for developing this ``mammographers assistant`` are film mammograms which we have digitized at either 70 {mu}m or 35 {mu}m per pixel resolution with 4096 (12 bits) of gray level per pixel. For each potential microcalcification detected in these images, we compute a number of features in order to distinguish between the different kinds of objects detected.
Research Organization:
Lawrence Livermore National Lab., CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
DOE Contract Number:
W-7405-ENG-48
OSTI ID:
32784
Report Number(s):
UCRL-JC--113102; CONF-9302108--2; ON: DE95008072
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English