Improvement of mammographic lesion detection by fusion of information from different views
Sophie Paquerault, Nicholas Petrick, Heang‐Ping Chan, Berkman Sahiner · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2001
In screening mammography, two standard views, craniocaudal (CC) and medio-lateral oblique (MLO), are commonly taken, and radiologists use information from the two views for lesion detection and diagnosis. Current computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems are designed to detect lesions on each view separately. We are developing a CAD method that utilizes information from the two views to reduce false-positives (FPs). Our two-view detection scheme consists of two main stages, a one-view pre-screening stage and a two-view correspondence stage. The one-view and two-view scores are then fused to estimate the likelihood that an object is a true mass. In this study, we analyzed the effectiveness of the proposed fusion scheme for FP reduction and its dependence on the number of objects per image in the pre-screening stage. The preliminary results demonstrate that the fusion of information from the CC and MLO views significantly reduced the FP rate in comparison to the one-view scheme. When the pre-screening stage produced 10 objects per image, the two-view fusion technique reduced the FP rate from an average of 2.1 FPs/image in our current one-view CAD scheme to 1.2 FPs/image at a sensitivity of 80%. The results also indicate that the improvement in the detection accuracy was essentially independent of the number of initial objects per image obtained at the pre-screening stage for this data set.