Detection of calcifications within a medical image

Abstract

A method of detecting a calcification in a bounding box enclosing a portion of a medical image, including the steps of obtaining the medical image in digital form, filtering at least image data in the bounding box using a difference of Gaussians (DOG) filter, and thresholding the filtered image data to detect, as one or more calcifications, portions of the filtered image data which exceed a threshold. The detected calcification may be classified by segmenting the one or more detected calcifications, extracting at least one feature from the one or more segmented calcifications, and determining a likelihood of malignancy of the one or more detected calcifications.

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