Use of quadrature filters for detection of stellate lesions in mammograms

Abstract

We propose a method for finding stellate lesions in digitized mammograms based on the use of both local phase and local orientation information extracted from quadrature filter outputs. The local phase information allows efficient and fast separation between edges and lines and the local orientation estimates are used to find areas circumscribed by edges and with radiating lines. The method is incorporated in a computer-aided detection system and evaluation by FROC-curve analysis on a data set of 90 mammograms (45 pairs) yields a false positive rate of 0.3 per image at 90% sensitivity. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.