Not Applicable.
Not Applicable.
The present invention relates generally to the field of medical imaging systems. Particularly, the present invention relates to an algorithm for mass spicules detection, tracing and display from digital mammography images in conjunction with a mammography CAD (Computer-aided detection) server and a digital mammography workstation.
The U.S. patent Classification Definitions: 382/173 (class 382, Image Analysis, subclass 173 Image Segmentation); 378/37 (class 378, X-Ray or Gamma Ray System or Devices, subclass 37 Mammography).
Mass spicules are visible as lines radiating from the margin of a mass. Most breast carcinomas have a mammographic appearance with such a spiculated structure, so it is an important sign used by radiologists when making a cancer diagnosis. The quality of automatic spicules detection and tracing has a direct impact on the detection performance of a CAD system. Displaying this information on a CAD workstation helps radiologists understand the CAD markers, and is especially important to help the radiologist dismiss false positive markers, and to enforce a positive finding. Currently no CAD system or workstation displays computer generated spicules traces (see reference 1).
The current invention provides an algorithm to detect and trace the spicules in digital mammograms using an adaptive threshold to obtain a spicules feature map which is followed by a flood-fill segmentation algorithm to obtain the spicules tracing. Elongation criteria are used to remove false edges that do not radiate from the central mass margin. The algorithm works on a central mass border and spicules feature map that contains a subset of the entire image, so processing time is fast, allowing use in a mammography CAD server, and real-time computation within a digital mammography workstation.
There are two main steps used to obtain the spicules from a mass candidate ROI (region of interest): (1) pre-process the ROI to obtain a central mass segmentation and spicules feature map; (2) region grow from the central mass border into the spicules feature map by a flood-fill segmentation algorithm to obtain individual spicules.
The algorithm can also be applied to breast ultrasound and breast MRI images to obtain stellar margin tracings.
The detailed pre-processing steps are shown in
A ROI (region of interest) is extracted from the mass candidate. The size of the region is defined as 4 times of the estimated mass size obtained from initial candidate calculation. The ROI is then down-sampled (or up-sampled) to a fixed dimension (such as, 256×256).
If the ROI is partially on the breast skin-line or chest-wall edges, the pixels outside the breast are filled up by mirroring the pixels inside the breast.
The fixed dimension ROI is enhanced by the following steps: (1) band-pass filtering using Gaussian blur difference with kernel size 96 and 8; (2) produce a directional edge image from the ROI, for example, using a 4 or 8 directional wavelet filter; (3) add the band-pass image weighting by 4 and the directional edge image to form the enhanced ROI image; (4) modulate the image with a “hat” shape modular, such as, Gaussian weights to obtain the enhanced ROI.
Use flood-fill segmentation technique to the enhanced ROI to search for central mass segmentation in the range between the seed-pixel-value (center of the candidate ROI) and the maximum-pixel-value within the ROI. Then the candidate location is updated to the centroid of the mass segmentation.
Apply an adaptive threshold algorithm to the enhanced ROI and the edge image to obtain the spicules feature map. The output of the
The central mass segmentation is dilated by 1 pixel. The central mass segmentation is subtracted from the dilated mass segmentation to obtain the central mass border trace.
The spicules feature map is masked by central mass segmentation. The masked result is added to the central mass border to obtain the “hollow” spicules feature map.
Any pixel on the central mass border can be used as a seed, and the flood-fill algorithm is applied over the hollow spicules feature map to obtain the spicules feature segmentation.
The central mass border trace is subtracted from the spicules feature segmentation to obtain the individual spicules segmentation masks.
Those false spicules that do not radiate from the centroid of the central mass segmentation are removed using elongation criteria.
The resulted spicules segmentation mask can be displayed to aid radiologists in cancer diagnosis, or can be used to extract spicules feature for Computer-aided detection server.
An initial mass candidate (410) is selected as region of interest for further processing. The size of the region is defined as 4 times of the estimated mass size obtained from initial candidate calculation. The ROI is then down-sampled to a fixed dimension (such as, 256×256). The pixels outside the breast are filled up by mirroring the pixels inside the breast.
The central mass segmentation (420) is obtained using the algorithm described in
The central mass border and the spicules feature map (430) are generated using the algorithm described in
The spicules tracing result (440) is obtained using the algorithm described in
The tracing result is overlaid on the original image (450) to display on a review workstation to aid radiologists in making diagnosis.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,815,591 Sep. 1998 Roehrig, Romsdahl and Zhang “Method and apparatus for fast detection of spiculated lesions in digital mammograms” U.S. Ser. No. 12/099,785 Zhang and Heffernan “Algorithms for selecting mass density candidates from digital mammograms”
Number | Date | Country | |
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60930131 | May 2007 | US |