A novel shape feature to classify microcalcifications
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Ma, Yiming; Tay, Peter C.; Adams, Robert D.; Zhang, James Z.
- Source
- 2010 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing Image Processing (ICIP), 2010 17th IEEE International Conference on. :2265-2268 Sep, 2010
- Subject
- Signal Processing and Analysis
Computing and Processing
Shape
Delta-sigma modulation
Approximation methods
Measurement
Breast cancer
Wavelet analysis
cancer
shape measurement
- Language
- ISSN
- 1522-4880
2381-8549
The cited references claim that microcalcifications from many benign regions are all round or oval. The detection of at least one roughly shaped microcalcification in a suspicious region could be an early sign of potentially developing malignant cancer. This paper proposes a shape analysis method to aid radiologists in classifying regions of interest that are difficult to diagnosis. A region growing and a gradient vector flow methods are used to obtain an ordered set of contour points of each microcalcification. A three level wavelet transform frequency analysis provides a band pass approximation of the normalized distance signature. A novel metric derived from the normalized distance signature is proposed to quantify the roughness of a microcalcification. An experiment using a large dataset is used to evaluate the robustness of the proposed roughness metric against several published shape features.