Shape analysis of mammographic calcifications

A set of shape factors has been developed to measure the roughness of regions of calcifications in mammograms, to aid in their classification as malignant or benign. The analysis of mammograms is performed in three stages. First, a region growing technique is used to obtain the contours of regions including calcifications. Then, measures of shape features, such as compactness, moments, and Fourier descriptors, are computed for each region. Finally, their applicability to classification is studied by using the above shape measures to form feature vectors