Detection of Microcalcifications with Vessels, Using Linear Structure Analysis and Uncertainty Tracking Technique in Mammography

As a potential biomarker for women’s cardiovascular and chronic kidney diseases, breast arterial calcification (BAC) in mammography has become an emerging research topic in recent years. To provide a more objective measurement for vascular structures with calcium depositions in mammography, this paper introduces a new computerized method to delineate calcified vessels. Specifically, we leverage two underlying cues—calcification and vesselness—within a multiple seeded tracking with uncertainty scheme. This new vessel-tracking scheme generates numerous sampling paths to describe the complicated topology of vascular structures with calcium depositions. A compiling and linking process is further employed to organize these sampling paths into vessel segments that are likely part of the same vessel tract. The proposed method has been evaluated on 63 mammograms, comparing manual delineations from two experts using various assessment metrics. The experimental results confirm the efficacy and stability of the proposed method, indicating its potential use as a convenient BAC measurement tool, replacing the trivial and tedious manual delineation tasks