[A new approach to mammogram detection by using morphological and laplacion-of-a-gaussian filter]

Microcalcification is an early sign of breast cancer appearing as isolated bright spots in mammogram images. However, there is a difficulty in detecting the spots because they are small-sized and have noisy and big image background. Morphological bandpass filter (MBF) is a fast method for detecting microcalcifications, but the accuracy there-by is not satisfied. Though Laplacion-of-a-Gaussian (LoGF) method can achieve high accuracy in location, it is time consuming. For these reasons, a new detection method for combining the two above-mentioned methods is proposed in this paper. We conducted the experiments on the breast cancer database of Nanjing Zhongda Hospital. The experimental results confirm that the detecting speed for microcalcifications is comparable to that with the use of morphological filter method, and the detection precision is comparable to that with the use of LoGF method.