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Biennial International Conference on Information Processing in Medical Imaging

IPMI 2001: Information Processing in Medical Imaging pp 1–11Cite as

On the Difficulty of Detecting Tumors in Mammograms

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 2082))

Abstract

We did human observer experiments using a hybrid image technique to determine the variation of tumor contrast thresholds for detection as a function of tumor sizes. This was done with both mammographic backgrounds and filtered noise with the same power spectra. We obtained the very surprising result that contrast had to be increased as lesion size increased to maintain contrast detectability. All previous investigations with white noise, radiographic and CT imaging system noise have shown the opposite effect. We compared human results to predictions of a number of observer models and found fairly good qualitative agreement. However we found that human performance was better than what would be expected if mammographic structure was assumed to be pure noise. This disagreement can be accounted for by using a simple scaling correction factor.

Acknowledgements

Larry Clarke and Maria Kallergi provided the mammograms. Jack Beutel digitized the specimen radiographs and provided H&D curve data. We also thank Craig Abbey, Dev Chakraborty, Kyle Myers and Robert Wagner for very helpful discussions. This research was supported by grant R01-CA58302 from the National Cancer Institute.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Radiology Department, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 75 Francis St., Boston, MA, 02115

    Arthur E. Burgess, Francine L. Jacobson & Philip F. Judy

Authors
  1. Arthur E. Burgess
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  2. Francine L. Jacobson
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  3. Philip F. Judy
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Biomedical Engineering, University of California, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA, 95616, USA

    Michael F. Insana

  2. Signal and Image Processing Institute, University of Southern California, 3740 McClintock Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, 90089-2564, USA

    Richard M. Leahy

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© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Burgess, A.E., Jacobson, F.L., Judy, P.F. (2001). On the Difficulty of Detecting Tumors in Mammograms. In: Insana, M.F., Leahy, R.M. (eds) Information Processing in Medical Imaging. IPMI 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2082. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45729-1_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45729-1_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-42245-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45729-9

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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