Removing radiopaque artifacts from mammograms using area morphology
Michael Alexander Wirth, Jennifer A. Lyon, Dennis Nikitenko, Alexei Stapinski · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2004
A mammogram contains two distinctive regions: the exposed breast region and the unexposed air-background region. The background region often contains radiopaque artifacts in the form of identification labels, radiopaque markers, and wedges. The primary motivation for removing such artifacts from mammograms is too lessen their effect on subsequent processing algorithms. For example, accurate segmentation of the breast region is an important pre-processing step in the computerized analysis of mammograms. It allows the search for abnormalities to be limited to the breast region of the mammogram without undue influence from the background. One of the problems with precise segmentation of the breast region is that high-intensity radiopaque artifacts can result in a non-uniform background region, and interfere with deriving an accurate representation of the breast contour. This paper proposes a new approach for removing radiopaque artifacts from the background region of mammograms based on the concept of area morphology. Area morphology uses attributes of structures rather than a fixed shape structuring element as used in classical morphology. This allows radiopaque artifacts to be removed, irrespective of shape.