• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
• /
• v.19 no.1
• /
• pp.1-8
• /
• 1998

Clustered microcalcifications on X-ray mammograms are an important sign for early detection of breast cancer. This paper proposes a computer-aided diagnosis method for the detection of clustered microcalcifications and marking their locations on digitized mammograms. The proposed detection method consists of the region of interest (ROI) selection, the film-artifact removal, the surrounding texture analysis method for the detection of clustered microcalcifications, which is based on the second-order histogram in two nested surrounding regions on the current pixel. This paper also describes the effectiveness of the proposed film-artifact removal filter in terms of the classification performance with the receiver operating-characteristics(ROC) analysis. A three-layer backpropagation neural network is employed as a classifier. The appropriate marking for the locations of clustered microcalcifications can be used to alert radiologists to locations of suspicious lesions.