Detection of arterial calcification in mammograms by random walks

A fully automatic algorithm is developed for breast arterial calcification extraction in mammograms. This algorithm is implemented in two major steps: a random-walk based tracking step and a compiling and linking step. With given seeds from detected calcification points, the tracking algorithm traverses the vesselness map by exploring the uncertainties of three tracking factors, i.e., traversing direction, jumping distance, and vesselness value, to generate all possible sampling paths. The compiling and linking algorithm further organizes and groups all sampling paths into calcified vessel tracts. The experimental results show that the performance of the proposed automatic calcification extraction algorithm is statistically close to that obtained by manual delineations.