Detection of spicules in mammograms

The objective of this paper is to propose a method to automatically detect spicule shadows in mammograms. The method is consisted of two steps, enhancement and feature selection. First, spicule shadows are enhanced by using a newly developed operation. An opening operation is applied to remove noises and a direction map is made for feature selection. Second, a concentration expression is given with gray levels and two features are selected for recognition of tumors with spicules. In the method, the direction of spicules is not only considered, but the density is also utilized for classification of tumors with spicules. The method was tested on 24 samples including seven tumors with spicules. The recognition rate for tumors with spicules was 100% without the false positives