A novel shape feature to classify microcalcifications
Yiming Ma, Peter C. Tay, Robert D. Adams, James Z. Zhang · 2010
The cited references claim that microcalcifications from many benign regions are all round or oval. The detection of at least one roughly shaped microcalcification in a suspicious region could be an early sign of potentially developing malignant cancer. This paper proposes a shape analysis method to aid radiologists in classifying regions of interest that are difficult to diagnosis. A region growing and a gradient vector flow methods are used to obtain an ordered set of contour points of each microcalcification. A three level wavelet transform frequency analysis provides a band pass approximation of the normalized distance signature. A novel metric derived from the normalized distance signature is proposed to quantify the roughness of a microcalcification. An experiment using a large dataset is used to evaluate the robustness of the proposed roughness metric against several published shape features.