Assessment of a Breast Mass Identification Procedure Using an Iris Detector

Breast cancer is the main cause of cancer deaths among women in the world. About one million new cases appear every year, and about 25% of them lead to the death of the patient. The best solution is the early detection of suspicious tumoral signs through an effective mammographic screening program. Unfortunately, this kind of images is very difficult to interpret by the radiologists because of its very low contrast, so proper image-processing procedures could help them to achieve better diagnoses. This paper improves and assesses an algorithm, already proposed by the authors, that suggests to doctors the suspicious regions that could contain tumoral masses. The procedure succeeds also in the case of very low contrast because it depends only on the orientation of the gradient vectors in the image but not on their amplitude.