Development of an automated method for detecting mammographic masses with a partial loss of region

Recently, we have been developing several automated algorithms for detecting masses on mammograms. For our algorithm, we devised an adaptive thresholding technique for detecting masses, but our system failed to detect masses with a partial loss of region that were located on the edge of the film. This is a common issue in all of the algorithms developed so far by other groups. In order to deal with this problem, we propose a new method in the present study. The partial loss masses are identified by their similarity to a sector-form model in the template matching process. To calculate the similarity, four features are applied: 1) average pixel value; 2) standard deviation of pixel values; 3) standard correlation coefficient defined by the sector-form model; and 4) concentration feature determined from the density gradient. After employing the new method to 335 digitized mammograms, the detection sensitivity for the partial loss masses jumped from 70% to 90% when the number of false positives was kept constant (0.2/image). Moreover, a combination of the existing method and the new method improved the true-positive rate up to 97%. Such results indicate that the new technique may improve the performance of our computer-aided diagnosis system for mammographic masses effectively.