The wavelet-frame-based microcalcification detection

As the leading cause of death for adult women under 54 years of age in the United States, breast cancer accounts for 29% of all cancers in women. Early diagnosis of breast cancer is the most effective approach to reduce death rate. The rapid climbing of the health care cost further reiterates the importance of cost-effective, accurate screening tools for breast cancer. This paper proposes a wavelet frame based computer algorithm for screening of microcalcifications on digitized mammographical imagery.* Despite its simplicity, the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) of compactly supported wavelets has been effectively used for detection of various types of signals. However, the shifting variant property of DWT makes it very unstable for detection of minute microcalcifications. Although increasing the sampling rate will improve the detection probability, this approach will drastically increase the size of mammographical images. The wavelet frame transform can be easily derived from the DWT algorithm by eliminating its down sampling step. The subtle difference between DWT and WF in down sampling is shown to be critical to the accuracy of microcalcifications detection. Without any down sampling, local image information at different scales is preserved. By joint thresholding of wavelet coefficients at different scales, one can accurately pin point suspected microcalcifications. A simple partitioning technique enables the detection algorithm to process image blocks independently. Four different partitioning techniques have been compared, and the method of repeating the end value on each partition boundary has the least significant impact on the detection accuracy.