Automated analysis for microcalcifications in high resolution digital mammograms

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 mamrnograms 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.