by Guliato, Denise; Carvalho, Juliano D.; Rangayyan, Rangaraj M.; Santiago, Sérgio A.

Malignant breast tumors and benign masses appear in mammograms with different shape characteristics: the former usually have rough, spiculated, or microlobulated contours, whereas the latter commonly have smooth, round, oval, or macrolobulated contours. Features that characterize shape roughness and complexity can assist in distinguishing between malignant tumors and benign masses. Signatures of contours may be used to analyze their shapes. We propose to use a signature based on the turning angle function of contours of breast masses to derive features that capture the characteristics of shape roughness as described above. We propose methods to derive an index of the presence of convex regions (XR

_TA
), an index of the presence of concave regions (VR

_TA
), an index of convexity (CX

_TA
), and two measures of fractal dimension (FD

_TA
and FDd

_TA
) from the turning angle function. The methods were tested with a set of 111 contours of 65 benign masses and 46 malignant tumors with different parameters. The best classification accuracies in discriminating between benign masses and malignant tumors, obtained for XR

_TA
, VR

_TA
, CX

_TA
, FD

_TA
, and FDd

_TA
in terms of the area under the receiver operating characteristics curve, were 0.92, 0.92, 0.93, 0.93, and, 0.92, respectively.

DOI: 10.1007/s10278-007-9069-9
Online Date: 10/31/2007
Print publication date: 6/1/2008
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by Baum, Karl G.; Helguera, María; Krol, Andrzej

A new application, Fusion Viewer, available for free, has been designed and implemented with a modular object-oriented design. The viewer provides both traditional and novel tools to fuse 3D data sets such as CT (computed tomography), MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), PET (positron emission tomography), and SPECT (single photon emission tomography) of the same subject, to create maximum intensity projections (MIP) and to adjust dynamic range. In many situations, it is desirable and advantageous to acquire biomedical images in more than one modality. For example, PET can be used to acquire functional data, whereas MRI can be used to acquire morphological data. In some situations, a side-by-side comparison of the images provides enough information, but in most of the cases it may be necessary to have the exact spatial relationship between the modalities presented to the observer. To accomplish this task, the images need to first be registered and then combined (fused) to create a single image. In this paper, we discuss the options for performing such fusion in the context of multimodal breast imaging. Additionally, a novel spline-based dynamic range technique is presented in detail. It has the advantage of obtaining a high level of contrast in the intensity range of interest without discarding the intensity information outside of this range while maintaining a user interface similar to the standard window/level windowing procedure.

DOI: 10.1007/s10278-007-9082-z
Online Date: 10/25/2007
Print publication date: 10/1/2008
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by Laprise, Nicole K.; Hanusik, Richard; FitzGerald, T. J.; Rosen, Nancy; White, Keith S.

The Quality Assurance Review Center (QARC) works to improve the standards of care in treating cancer by improving the quality of clinical trials medicine. QARC operates as a data management and review center providing quality assurance services for multiple external groups including cooperative groups and pharmaceutical companies. As the medical world migrates from analog film to digital files, QARC has developed an innovative and unique digital imaging management system to accommodate this trend. As QARC acquires electronic data from institutions across six continents, the system is continually developed to accommodate Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) imaging originating from a wide variety of Picture Archival and Communications System (PACS) manufacturers, thus creating one of the largest and most diverse multi-institutional imaging archives in the cancer research community.

DOI: 10.1007/s10278-007-9080-1
Online Date: 10/9/2007
Print publication date: 2/1/2009
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