Wavelet transforms for detecting microcalcifications in mammography

Clusters of fine, granular microcalcifications in mammograms may be an early sign of disease. Individual grains are difficult to detect and segment due to size and shape variability and because the background mammogram texture is inhomogeneous. We present a two-stage method based on wavelet transforms for detecting and segmenting calcifications. The first stage consists of a full resolution wavelet transform, which is simply the conventional filter bank implementation without downsampling, so that all sub-bands remain at full size. Four octaves are computed with two inter-octave voices for finer scale resolution. By appropriate selection of the wavelet basis the detection of microcalcifications in the relevant size range can be nearly optimized in the details sub-bands. Detected pixel sites in the LH, HL, and HH sub-bands are heavily weighted before computing the inverse wavelet transform. The LL component is omitted since gross spatial variations are of little interest. Individual microcalcifications are often greatly enhanced in the output image, to the point where straightforward thresholding can be applied to segment them. FROC curves are computed from tests using a well-known database of digitized mammograms. A true positive fraction of 85% is achieved at 0.5 false positives per image