A novel background subtraction method to detect microcalcifications

This paper proposes a novel background subtraction method to detect microcalcifications. The proposed method is a Laplacian pyramid scheme with the low pass filter replaced by the squeeze box filter (SBF). The SBF was originally developed to remove speckle noise from medical B mode ultrasound images. The SBF is adapted to identify the background of mammographic images. Thus microcalcifications can be isolated in regions of interest to enhance visual examination or automatic detection methods.