A new approach for the detection of mammary calcifications by using the white Top-Hat transform and thresholding of Otsu

The mammography is the technique of imagery the most used to detect tumors at an early stage, it is currently the principal investigation in the tracking of the breast cancer. The presence of calcification in mammography is particularly interesting for the early detection of the breast cancer. In this paper, we propose to use a system for the detection of calcifications, based on a new approach suggested of pretreatment of image mammography. The latter is based on the suppression of noise (to decrease the noise to the maximum) by a Gaussian filter in order to bring out all the spots (Clear Spots) possible to be calcifications; by using an operator of the white Top-Hat transform. This hat is resulting from the mathematical morphology, which makes it possible to keep only these small structures. The segmentation by the simple technique of Otsu [1] is then used in order to separate detected calcifications. Visually, the obtained results are very clear, and show the good performance of the new approach suggested in this work. This latter allows extracting successfully the calcifications starting from the mammography referents from the mini-MIAS database [2].