A method to contrast enhancement of digital dense breast images aimed to detect clustered microcalcifications

Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) schemes have been developed in many research centers to help the early detection of breast cancer. However, dense breast images are a challenge to CAD schemes due to the low contrast between structures of interest (such as microcalcifications-small size structures-which usually are associated to several breast tumors) and the background. This work describes a method to eliminate the background of a digitized mammogram image as well as two specific techniques to enhance the contrast in dense breast digital images as part of a CAD scheme under development in our group. The results indicate that these techniques can improve the performance of the scheme, and, thus, it can help in the early detection of breast cancer.