Hi, I have a quick question. Do you know how (or using what software) the dream mammogram images are postprocessed before it's made available to us? Any special kind of contrast normalization for instance? I am asking since apparently they look different from what you normally get from the equipment. Thanks! Hossein

Created by Hossein Azizpour azizpour
Like David said, the pilot images are also very similar to the digital images we get from our Hologic systems locally here in Joliette. But there usually is a post-processing filter applied to the raw acquisition by the mammography machine before sending the images to the PACS archiving system. This filter is usually decided at the installation and can be changed later if desired. This machine specific filter is usually chosen by consensus by the team of radiologists. A noisier filter can in theory improves sensitivity to microcalcifications clusters (but lower specificity) ; a smoother filter improves edge caracterisation (higher specificity) of masses/distortions. There is no gold standard filter applied to improve radiologist interpretation; only local preferences. A winning algorithm in this competition could potentially be biased to the dominant filter used in the training/validation datasets.
What makes you say that they look different? The sample images were similar to what we have at our institution without any post-processing. Most other public datasets are film (which is very different), not digital like this one.
No, we don?t know what post-processing has been performed between the raw imaging acquisition and preparing images for clinical interpretation. The Challenge received the images available for clinical interpretation.

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