Adaptation of the Daugman-Downing texture demodulation to highlight circumscribed mass lesions on mammograms

J. Daugman and C. Downing introduced a new method (see "Spatial Vision in Humans and Robots: The Proceedings of the 1991 York Conference on Spatial Vision in Humans and Robots", ch.5, p.63-87, Cambridge University Press, 1993) for decomposing textures using a demodulation transform that they claimed had its basis in human visual perception. We argue that their transform may be applied to mammograms for image texture analysis and tissue characterization. An adaptation made to their demodulation transform is presented for the purpose of highlighting circumscribed mass lesions on mammograms. Three major modifications are introduced: (a) Fourier half-plane selection; (b) amplitude-only and phase-only reconstruction; (c) image subtraction to highlight masses on mammograms. This adapted algorithm exhibits high sensitivity for detecting circumscribed mass lesions and initial results are promising.