Technical Advancements to Mobile Mammography Using Nonlinear Polynomial Filters and IEEE 21451-1 NCAP Information Model

Mobile mammography programs provide a vast access to breast cancer screening and also ensure participation from remote areas, which are generally deprived of fixed centers. However, there exists limitations to provide on the spot analysis and diagnosis by experienced radiologists. The rapid development of ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451-x Standards has lead to the emergence of smart biomedical devices for screening and detection of life threatening diseases. IEEE 21451-1 provides for networking of these smart transducers, yielding economical and reliable solutions for diverse measurements, control, and clinical applications. This paper proposes the technical advancements to mobile mammography by integrating smart transducer interface and network capable application processor (NCAP) information modules with digital mammography (X-ray) units. The digital data extracted by the hardware interface is processed using Type-0 and Type-I nonlinear polynomial filters (NPF) for improving the contrast of the region-of-interest as well as signal-to-noise ratios. The NPF serves as a postprocessing module, providing enhancement of mammograms for the purpose of precise analysis and diagnosis by radiologists. The enhanced mammograms are then transmitted to a remote monitoring station via NCAP through an optical fiber or satellite communication link. The proposed model yields a network as well as vendor-independent transducer interfaces for remote screening/diagnosis of breast cancer patients.