Characterization of breast masses for simulation purposes
Simulation of radiographic lesions is an important prerequisite for several research applications in medical imaging, including hardware and software design and optimization. For mammography, breast masses are an important class of lesions to be considered. In this study, we first characterized both benign and malignant breast masses with example mammograms from the Digital Database for Screening Mammography (DDSM). The measured properties of each of these mass types were then used to create a simulation routine that was capable of creating example masses from each category. A preliminary observer experiment was conducted to determine whether a mammographer could distinguish between the simulated and true masses. An ROC analysis indicated A z values of 0.59 and 0.61 for benign and malignant lesions, respectively, suggesting very similar appearance for the simulated and real lesions. A larger observer performance experiment with multiple mammographers is underway to validate these results. (This work was supported by a grant from the NIH, R21-CA95308.).
