Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) that uses content based image retrieval (CBIR) strategies has became an important research area. This paper presents a retrieval strategy that automatically recovers mammography masses from a virtual repository of mammographies. Unlike other approaches, we do not attempt to segment masses but instead we characterize the regions previously selected by an expert. These regions are firstly curvelet transformed and further characterized by approximating the marginal curvelet subband distribution with a generalized gaussian density (GGD). The content based retrieval strategy searches similar regions in a database using the Kullback-Leibler divergence as the similarity measure between distributions. The effectiveness of the proposed descriptor was assessed by comparing the automatically assigned label with a ground truth available in the DDSM database.¹ A total of 380 masses with different shapes, sizes and margins were used for evaluation, resulting in a mean average precision rate of 89.3% and recall rate of 75.2% for the retrieval task.

Date Published: 23 February 2012
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 8315, Medical Imaging 2012: Computer-Aided Diagnosis, 83150A (23 February 2012); doi: 10.1117/12.911680

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8315:
Medical Imaging 2012: Computer-Aided Diagnosis
Bram van Ginneken; Carol L. Novak, Editor(s)