ABSTRACT
We have carried out a receiver operating characteristics (ROC) study for the enhancement of mammographic features in digitized mammograms. The study evaluated the benefits of multiscale enhancement methods in terms of diagnostic performance of radiologists. The enhancement protocol relied on multiscale expansions and nonlinear enhancement functions. Dyadic spline wavelet functions (first derivative of a cubic spline) were used together with a sigmoidal nonlinear enhancement function (1,2). We designed a computer interface on a softcopy display and performed an ROC study with three radiologists, who specialized in mammography. Clinical cases were obtained from a national mammography database of digitized radiographs prepared by the University of South Florida (USF) and Harvard Medical School.
