Adaboost with dummy-variable modeling for reduction of false positives in detection of clustered microcalcifications

Linear structures are a major contributor to false-positives (FPs) in detection of clustered microcalcifications (MCs) in mammograms. We propose a unified classifier approach to incorporate the dichotomous effect of linear structures in MC detection, the purpose being to suppress the FPs associated with linear structures. We introduce a dummy variable in the classifier model as in traditional regression analysis, the role of which is to adapt the input features to the classifier according to the presence of linear structures. In the experiment we demonstrate the proposed approach by using Adaboost decision stumps as the unified classifier. The results on a set of 200 mammogram images (all containing clustered MCs) show that it could reduce the FPs in an existing SVM detector by up to 47.3% with the true-positive rate at 85%.