micro-calcifications detection
Breast calcifications are deposits of calcium inside breast tissue. They appear widespread in the breast and most women will have a few on their mammograms at some point in time. Most calcifications will not be detected during clinical exams or breast self-examination. However, mammography allows to find them long prior to they could move forward into an actual lump. This fact helps explaining why developed countries are adopting the so-called screening programs, which mainly consist in promoting regular women examinations using mammography.
We developed a new approach for the detection of microcalcifications and clusters. The individual microcalcification detection is based on learning the variation in morphology of the microcalcifications using local image features. Afterwards, this set of features is used to train a pixel-based boosting classifier which at each round automatically selects the most salient microcalcification feature. Therefore, when a new mammogram is tested, only the salient features are computed and used to classify each pixel of the mammogram as being part of a microcalcification or actually being normal tissue. Afterwards, the microcalcification clusters are found by inspecting the local neighbourhood of each microcalcification:
