Finding corresponding regions of interest in mediolateral oblique and craniocaudal mammographic views

In this paper we present a method to link potentially suspicious mass regions detected by a Computer-Aided Detection (CAD) scheme in mediolateral oblique (MLO) and craniocaudal (CC) mammographic views of the breast. For all possible combinations of mass candidate regions, a number of features are determined. These features include the difference in the radial distance from the candidate regions to the nipple, the gray scale correlation between both regions, and the mass likelihood of the regions determined by the single view CAD scheme. Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) is used to discriminate between correct and incorrect links. The method was tested on a set of 412 cancer cases. In each case a malignant mass, architectural distortion, or asymmetry was annotated. In 92% of these cases the candidate mass detections by CAD included the cancer regions in both views. It was found that in 82% of the cases a correct link between the true positive regions in both views could be established by our method. Possible applications of the method may be found in multiple view analysis to improve CAD results, and for the presentation of CAD results to the radiologist on a mammography workstation.