ENHANCEMENT OF SCREEN FILM MAMMOGRAM UP TO A LEVEL OF DIGITAL MAMMOGRAM: EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS

Abstract

Breast cancer is one of the major causes of death among women. If a cancer can be detected early, the options of treatment and the chances of total recovery will increase. From a woman's point of view, the procedure practiced (compression of breasts to record an image) to obtain a digital mammogram (DM) is exactly the same that is used to obtain a screen film mammogram (SFM). The quality of DM is undoubtedly better than SFM. However, obtaining DM is costlier and very few institutions can afford DM machines. According to the National Cancer Institute 92% of breast imaging centers in India do not have digital mammography machines and they depend on the conventional SFM. Hence in this context, one should answer "Can SFM be enhanced up to a level of DM?" In this paper, we discuss our experimental analysis in this regard. We applied elementary image enhancement techniques to obtain enhanced SFM. We performed the quality analysis of DM and enhanced SFM using standard metrics like PSNR and RMSE on more than 350 mammograms. We also used mean opinion score (MOS) analysis to evaluate enhanced SFMs. The results showed that the clarity of processed SFM is as good as DM. Furthermore, we analyzed the extent of radiation exposed during SFM and DM. We presented our literally findings and clinical observations.