Morphological and related image processing techniques for the detection of microcalcifications in mammographic images

This paper describes a simple technique for locating microcalcifications in digital mammograms. These methods use the fact that many smoothing techniques are never applied to mammograms as they erase the important features. This is turned to an advantage by subtracting the smoothed image from the original, thus leaving only the important features. A variety of smoothers and enhancers are applied to two image data sets, and the results reported.