Open AccessA fast and simple method for the visual enhancement of microcalcifications in digital mammograms based on mathematical morphology
Author(s) -
Tomislav Stojić
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
nuclear technology and radiation protection
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.31
H-Index - 16
eISSN - 1452-8185
pISSN - 1451-3994
DOI - 10.2298/ntrp1402108s
Subject(s) - preprocessor , computer science , mathematical morphology , segmentation , artificial intelligence , digital mammography , mammography , computer vision , simple (philosophy) , structuring element , pattern recognition (psychology) , image processing , image (mathematics) , medicine , philosophy , epistemology , cancer , breast cancer
A fast and simple method for the visual enhancement of small bright details in digital mam- mograms based on mathematical morphology is proposed. By a proper choice of the shape and size of the structuring element, an algorithm for a particular processing task - in this case, for the visual enhancement of microcalcifications in digital mammograms - was designed. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm was tested on publicly available mammograms from the mammographic image analysis society database. In all tested cases (23 mammograms), the proposed method successfully segmented and enhanced the existing microcalcifications, in- dependently verified by medical experts. The proposed procedure may be used both as a visual aid in clinical mammogram analysis or as a preprocessing step for further processing, such as segmentation, classification and detection of microcalcifications. Moreover, the algorithm is very fast and robust, thus applicable to real-time mammogram processing