The architectural distortion is a very important finding in interpreting breast cancers as well as microcalcification and mass on mammograms. In despite of the importance for detecting architectural distortions, no algorithms for detecting them have been reported. The purpose of this study is to develop a new detection method for focal retraction that is one of architectural distortions around skinline. In order to extract the thick mammary gland regions, binarization technique is performed. The top-hat processing based on morphological operators is applied to determine the suspect depressed regions around skinline. In our experiments, we have chosen linear structures in seven. The false positives are eliminated by the features of their sizes and positions. After applying this technique to 17 digitized mammograms, the detection sensitivity was 94 with 2.3 false positives per image. It is concluded that this technique is effective to detect the architectural distortion.
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