COMPUTER AIDED DETECTION OF MASSES AND CLUSTERED MICROCALCIFICATIONS WITH SINGLE AND MULTIPLE INPUT IMAGE CONTEXT CLASSIFICATION STRATEGIES

A computer aided detection method and system to assist radiologists in the reading of medical images. The method and system has particular application to the area of mammography including detection of clustered microcalcifications and densities. A microcalcification detector is provided wherein individual detections are rank ordered and classified, and one of the features for classification is derived using a multilayer perceptron. A density detector is provided including an iterative, dynamic region growing module with embedded subsystem for rank ordering and classification of a best subset of candidate masks. A post processing stage is provided where detections are analyzed in the context of a set of images for a patient. Three analysis methods are used to distribute a limited number of detections across the image set and further within each image, and additionally to perform a normalcy classification. The normalcy classification is used to remove all detections from an image set when predetermined normalcy conditions are met. The final output of the system is a set of indications overlaid on the input medical images.