Method and System for Image Analysis to Detect Cancer
This addresses the lack of publicly accessible and comprehensive CAD systems for breast cancer detection, which could reduce human errors in mammogram analysis, though it appears incremental by combining existing methods into a full system.
The paper tackles the problem of breast cancer detection by developing a complete Computer Aided Detection (CAD) system that includes novel algorithms for image enhancement and detection of masses and microcalcifications, achieving accuracy superior to literature results and most commercial systems, and deploying it on a cloud-based architecture for public access.
Breast cancer is the most common cancer and is the leading cause of cancer death among women worldwide. Detection of breast cancer, while it is still small and confined to the breast, provides the best chance of effective treatment. Computer Aided Detection (CAD) systems that detect cancer from mammograms will help in reducing the human errors that lead to missing breast carcinoma. Literature is rich of scientific papers for methods of CAD design, yet with no complete system architecture to deploy those methods. On the other hand, commercial CADs are developed and deployed only to vendors' mammography machines with no availability to public access. This paper presents a complete CAD; it is complete since it combines, on a hand, the rigor of algorithm design and assessment (method), and, on the other hand, the implementation and deployment of a system architecture for public accessibility (system). (1) We develop a novel algorithm for image enhancement so that mammograms acquired from any digital mammography machine look qualitatively of the same clarity to radiologists' inspection; and is quantitatively standardized for the detection algorithms. (2) We develop novel algorithms for masses and microcalcifications detection with accuracy superior to both literature results and the majority of approved commercial systems. (3) We design, implement, and deploy a system architecture that is computationally effective to allow for deploying these algorithms to cloud for public access.