Essay CPS

Jose D. Angarita Pertuz

Research line : Biomedical imaging

nowadays the breast cancer is one of the most diagnosed cancer in Colombia among women,
according to Ten-Year Plan For Cancer control in Colombia [1]. the treatment to diagnosed this
kind of cancer is the mammography that consist in a image which is read by a radiologist, this
process have several issues like the reproducibility. the task for the radiologist is find breast density
and show the breast percent density.
the paper [2]. give a new way to make easy to read the image of the mammography. ”The aim
of this work is to develop a system independent breast percent density estimation algorithm for
mammography images”.
there is a previous related work [3] but have two main problems. the first one is that the
algorithms need ”unprocessed (raw) digital mammograms based on a physical model of the imaging
process” but this kind of mammograms often not available in clinical systems. The second one is,
the this algorithms need to be calibrated with mammograms before. In the paper [2] explain a
new algorithm that is feasible and have not the before problems.
In other hand the fibroglandular tissue tends to appear brighter in the mammogram then the
easy way to find this clearly is if we can see the different gray levels to show a image where we
could see the fibroglandular tissue but, due to problems at the moment to take ”the mammogram
it is not possible to define an universally valid intensity threshold for this task” [4]. In [2] show an
algorithm that is based on technique called ”Cumulus” [5]: this consist in sweep in the gray levels
for remove the fatty tissue and when the algorithm find a abrupt change then it stop after that,
the algorithm derived for quantify the change in the area segmented and this image is extracted
and the next process consist in detect the background from the area morphological with the next
equation:
2

Figure 1: Morphological Area

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 where l(x,y) is the intensity of each pixel, M is the number of pixels and ln the gray scale, this
equation means: measurement of the amount of segmented tissue as a function of the gray-level
threshold ln. But in this algorithm the important is the change of the gray levels that is calculate
by:
2.

Figure 2: funcion Ln

from [2]: ”On the whole, the algorithm only depends on two parameters: N the number of
gray levels and s the standard deviation of the Gaussian kernel. We experimentally found that N
= 25 and s = 0:8 yield a good performance”.
The problem with this algorithm is the ability to compare a mammogram taken previously with
a new one and see if something in the breast has changed, this is because at the moment of taking
the x-ray, the breast is pressed between two plates. https://www.radiologyinfo.org/sp/info.cfm?pg
=mammo. which leads to small details in the image go unnoticed by the radiologist, before this
problem I have an idea inspired by an application that is able to know what song is being heard
in just 10 seconds.
this application is Shazam [6]. This application consists of making a study of the frequency of
the song and analyzing certain points of the frequency, the algorithm define different point of the
spectrum and it records the differences found between one point and another and stores several
of them, when the system is used,it search in your database which differences of the song you are
listening to match those stored in the database
this idea we could use with the algorithm of [2] we can save the images and instead of searching
if their margins are equal, then we would look for which of those small differences which would be
unnoticed by the radiologist, my idea is that once obtained the graph that the equation would give
us (ln) we could obtain their own values and in this way store them. Once you want to compare
with a new mammogram then our algorithm can tell us at what point our value does not match
and in that way we can notice other possible diseases

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 Note: I wrote this document in English to show my ability to write in English, I know that I
need to improve it and I would like to join this group of Biomedical Imaging and help find new
algorithms. It would be great if with my thesis I could help other people.

References
[1] “Epidemiology of cancer in Colombia,” Colombia Medica, vol. 49, no. 1, pp. 09–12, 2018.

[2] I. Rinta-kiikka and K. Joni, “Morphological Area Gradient : System-independent Dense Tissue
Segmentation in Mammography Images.”

[3] S. van Engeland, P. R. Snoeren, H. Huisman, C. Boetes, and N. Karssemeijer, “Volumetric

breast density estimation from full-field digital mammograms,” IEEE transactions on medical
imaging, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 273–282, 2006.

[4] P. K. Saha, J. K. Udupa, E. F. Conant, D. P. Chakraborty, and D. Sullivan, “Breast tissue

density quantification via digitized mammograms,” IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging,
vol. 20, no. 8, pp. 792–803, 2001.

[5] J. W. Byng, N. Boyd, E. Fishell, R. Jong, and M. J. Yaffe, “The quantitative analysis of
mammographic densities,” Physics in Medicine & Biology, vol. 39, no. 10, p. 1629, 1994.

[6] J. Tang, G. Liu, and J. Guo, “Improved algorithms of music information retrieval based on
audio fingerprint,” 3rd International Symposium on Intelligent Information Technology Appli-
cation Workshops, IITAW 2009, pp. 367–371, 2009.