A Technique to Measure Breast Density in Digitized Mammograms

摘要

The early detection of breast cancer can be aided by computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) schemes. Usually these schemes are aimed to detect and to classify structures that can indicate the presence of an initial tumor. However, there is a problem to solve in these schemes: dense breasts, that difficult the early detection because of the low contrast between background and structures of interest (as microcalcifications, for example). We are developing a CAD scheme to detected clustered microcalcifications and we are currently testing this scheme with dense breast images. In mis work we present a computational technique to measure the breast density (as part of our CAD scheme) and an application of this technique in a set of mammograms. Results indicate that the technique is efficient in indicating how much a breast is dense, showing that it could help in increasing the performance of the CAD scheme in processing dense breast images.