The contemporary goals of breast cancer treatment are not limited to cure but include maximizing quality of
life. All breast cancer treatment can adversely affect breast appearance. Developing objective, quantifiable methods to
assess breast appearance is important to understand the impact of deformity on patient quality of life, guide selection of
current treatments, and make rational treatment advances. A few measures of aesthetic properties such as symmetry have
been developed. They are computed from the distances between manually identified fiducial points on digital
photographs. However, this is time-consuming and subject to intra- and inter-observer variability. The purpose of this
study is to investigate methods for automatic localization of fiducial points on anterior-posterior digital photographs
taken to document the outcomes of breast reconstruction. Particular emphasis is placed on automatic localization of the
nipple complex since the most widely used aesthetic measure, the Breast Retraction Assessment, quantifies the
symmetry of nipple locations. The nipple complexes are automatically localized using normalized cross-correlation with
a template bank of variants of Gaussian and Laplacian of Gaussian filters. A probability map of likely nipple locations
determined from the image database is used to reduce the number of false positive detections from the matched filter
operation. The accuracy of the nipple detection was evaluated relative to markings made by three human observers. The
impact of using the fiducial point locations as identified by the automatic method, as opposed to the manual method, on
the calculation of the Breast Retraction Assessment was also evaluated.
The purpose of this study was to investigate approaches for combining information from the MLO and CC mammographic views for Computer-aided Diagnosis (CADx) algorithms. Feature level and classifier output level combinations were explored. Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) with step-wise feature selection from a set of Haralick's texture features was used to develop classifiers for distinguishing between benign and malignant mammographic lesions. The effect of correlation between features from the two views on the performance of classifiers was investigated. The single view models included: (a) an LDA model with stepwise selection based on the MLO view only (MLO-Only) and similarly (b) a CC-Only LDA model. The feature-level combination models included: (a) LDA based on concatenation of feature sets selected independently from the two views (FEAT_CON), (b) LDA based on the concatenated feature sets along with the corresponding value of each feature from the opposite view (FEAT_COR_CON) if the correlation was below a threshold, (c) LDA based on the average of the MLO and CC feature values (FEAT_AVG). The classifier output level combination models investigated included: (a) average of the outputs of the MLO-Only and CC-Only classifiers (OUTPUT_AVG), (b) maximum of the outputs of the MLO-Only and CC-Only classifiers (OUTPUT_MAX), (c) minimum of the outputs of the MLO-Only and CC-Only classifiers (OUTPUT_MIN), (d) a second level LDA classifier on the outputs of the MLO-Only and CC-Only classifiers (OUTPUT_LDA), (e) product of the output values of the two classifiers (OUTPUT_PROD). The performance of the models was assessed and compared using the ROC methodology to determine if combination models performed better than the single-view models.
KEYWORDS: Detection and tracking algorithms, Computer aided diagnosis and therapy, Mammography, Breast, Image segmentation, Digital mammography, Breast cancer, Databases, Tissues, Cancer
In this paper we present a strategy for reducing the number of false-positives in computer-aided mass detection. Our approach is to only mark "consensus" detections from among the suspicious sites identified by different "stage-1" detection algorithms. By "stage-1" we mean that each of the Computer-aided Detection (CADe) algorithms is designed to operate with high sensitivity, allowing for a large number of false positives. In this study, two mass detection methods were used: (1) Heath and Bowyer's algorithm based on the average fraction under the minimum filter (AFUM) and (2) a low-threshold bi-lateral subtraction algorithm. The two methods were applied separately to a set of images from the Digital Database for Screening Mammography (DDSM) to obtain paired sets of mass candidates. The consensus mass candidates for each image were identified by a logical "and" operation of the two CADe algorithms so as to eliminate regions of suspicion that were not independently identified by both techniques. It was shown that by combining the evidence from the AFUM filter method with that obtained from bi-lateral subtraction, the same sensitivity could be reached with fewer false-positives per image relative to using the AFUM filter alone.
We present a new algorithm and preliminary results for classifying lesions into BI-RADS shape categories: round, oval, lobulated, or irregular. By classifying masses into one of these categories, computer aided detection (CAD) systems will be able to provide additional information to radiologists. Thus, such a tool could potentially be used in conjunction with a CAD system to enable greater interaction and personalization. For this classification task, we have developed a new set of features using the Beamlet transform, which is a recently developed multi-scale image analysis transform. We trained a k-Nearest Neighbor classifier using images from the Digital Database for Digital Mammography (DDSM). The method was tested on a set of 25 images of each type and we obtained a classification accuracy of 78% for classifying masses as oval or round and an accuracy of 72% for classifying masses as lobulated or round.
KEYWORDS: Image filtering, Image enhancement, Architectural distortion, Detection and tracking algorithms, Radon, Linear filtering, Radon transform, Breast cancer, Mammography, Cancer
Mass detection algorithms generally consist of two stages. The aim of the first stage is to detect all potential masses. In the second stage, the aim is to reduce the false-positives by classifying the detected objects as masses or normal tissue. In this paper, we present a new evidence based, stage-one algorithm for the detection of spiculated masses and architectural distortions. By evidence based, we mean that we use the statistics of the physical characteristics of these abnormalities to determine the parameters of the detection algorithm. Our stage-one algorithm consists of two steps, an enhancement step followed by a filtering step. In the first step, we propose a new technique for the enhancement of spiculations in which a linear filter is applied to the Radon transform of the image. In the second step, we filter the enhanced images with a new class of linear image filters called Radial Spiculation Filters. We have invented these filters specifically for detecting spiculated masses and architectural distortions that are marked by converging lines or spiculations. These filters are highly specific narrowband filters, which are designed to match the expected structures of these abnormalities and form a new class of wavelet-type filterbanks derived from optimal theories of filtering. A key aspect of this work is that each parameter of the filter has been incorporated to capture the variation in physical characteristics of spiculated masses and architectural distortions and that the parameters of the stage-one detection algorithm are determined by the physical measurements.
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