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Grant for breast cancer imaging research
Published by the Communications and Development Department
5 December 2002
Canterbury University engineering PhD student Kristin McLoughlin has been awarded the Royal Society of New Zealand’s R H T Bates scholarship to assist with her research into breast cancer imaging.
The scholarship, established in 1991, is a one-off grant of $5000 for research which aims to apply information and image processing to studies in medicine, the physical sciences or engineering.
Ms McLoughlin, a graduate of the University’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been researching the feasibility of developing a Computer Aided Detection (CAD) program to analyse mammogram images, and to assist in the early detection of breast cancer.
Ms McLoughlin said one of the most important radiological signs for early detection of breast cancer is the presence and appearance of microcalcifications, and her project focuses on developing a CAD system for the accurate detection of microcalcification clusters.
“The first step involves the segmentation of the boundary between breast and air to ensure all pixels processed are inside the breast, and thus save computational effort. The original mammogram image is segmented to determine which pixels are microcalcification and which are background.”
“True positive clusters are defined as a group of microcalcifications completely enclosed within the cancerous area marked by an expert radiologist.”
“It is not intended for the CAD program to completely replace the job of a radiologist, however, it would be a useful tool as a second opinion.”
She said the completed CAD scheme would be tested on several databases containing images with a variety of malignant and benign microcalcifications as well as normal mammogram images.
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