Computerized radiographic mass detection. I. Lesion site selection by morphological enhancement and contextual segmentation

This paper presents a statistical model supported approach for enhanced segmentation and extraction of suspicious mass areas from mammographic images. With an appropriate statistical description of various discriminate characteristics of both true and false candidates from the localized areas, an improved mass detection may be achieved in computer-assisted diagnosis (CAD). In this study, one type of morphological operation is derived to enhance disease patterns of suspected masses by cleaning up unrelated background clutters, and a model-based image segmentation is performed to localize the suspected mass areas using a stochastic relaxation labeling scheme. We discuss the importance of model selection when a finite generalized Gaussian mixture is employed, and use the information theoretic criteria to determine the optimal model structure and parameters. Examples are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed methods on mass lesion enhancement and segmentation when applied to mammographical images. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a very satisfactory performance as a preprocessing procedure for mass detection in CAD.