Size-adapted microcalcification segmentation in mammography utilizing scale-space signatures

Abstract

The purpose of this study is size-adapted segmentation of individual microcalcifications in mammography, based on microcalcification scale-space signature estimation, enabling robust scale selection for initialization of multiscale active contours. Segmentation accuracy was evaluated by the area overlap measure, by comparing the proposed method and two recently proposed ones to expert manual delineations. The method achieved area overlap of 0.61 ± 0.15 outperforming statistically ( p < 0.001) the other two methods (0.53 ± 0.18, 0.42 ± 0.16). Only the proposed method performed equally for both small (<460 μm) and large (≥460 μm) microcalcifications. Results indicate an accurate method, which could be utilized in computer-aided diagnosis schemes of microcalcification clusters.