A Clustering Method for the Extraction of Microcalcifications Using Epipolar Curves in Digital Breast Tomosynthesis

DBT provides significantly more information than mammography. This offers new opportunities to improve existing microcalcification detection methods. In a companion work in this volume, we showed that the use of epipolar curves can improve both the sensitivity and specificity of microcalcification detection. In this paper, we develop a clustering algorithm to form epipolar curves from candidate microcalcifications (which may be noise points), obtained after applying a detection algorithm to each individual projection. This enables the subsequent 3D analysis for the classification of microcalcification clusters.