Microcalcifications Detection in Digital Mammogram Using Morphological Bandpass Filters

Abstract

Microcalcifications in digital mammogram images can be an early sign of breast cancer. It is very challenging, however, to detect all microcalcifications since they appear as slightly brighter spots than their backgrounds. In this paper, a new method is proposed to efficiently detect all microcalcifications using morphological bandpass filters. Morphological bandpass filters, each with two different structuring elements, are tuned to isolate frequency components of microcalcifications in this method. Experimental results show that the proposed method with bandpass filters can recognize microcalcifications with a higher visibility and more accurate positions and sizes comparing to the well-known wavelet transform method. © Springer-Verlag 2004.