A fast and simple method for the visual enhancement of microcalcifications in digital mammograms based on mathematical morphology

Abstract

A fast and simple method for the visual enhancement of small bright details in digital mammograms based on mathematical morphology is proposed. By a proper choice of the shape and size of the structuring element, an algorithm for a particular processing task - in this case, for the visual enhancement of microcalcifications in digital mammograms - was designed. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm was tested on publicly available mammograms from the mammographic image analysis society database. In all tested cases (23 mammograms), the proposed method successfully segmented and enhanced the existing microcalcifications, independently verified by medical experts. The proposed procedure may be used both as a visual aid in clinical mammogram analysis or as a preprocessing step for further processing, such as segmentation, classification and detection of microcalcifications. Moreover, the algorithm is very fast and robust, thus applicable to real-time mammogram processing.