The Mammographic Image Analysis Society Breast cancer is a leading cause of fatality in women, with approximately 1 in 12 women affected by the desease during their lifetime. The radiographs are searched for signs of abnormality by expert radiologists. Mammograms are complex in appearance and signs of early desease are often small or subtle. Furthermore, the consequences of errors in detection or classification are costly. Since the advent of mass screening, there has thus been considerable interest in developing methods for automatically detecting mammographic abnormalities, as a means of aiding radiologists and improving the efficacy of screening programmes.
All disciplines are welcome.
Our numbers currently include physicists, radiologists, computer scientists, psychologists and others. We have long considered the provision of a database of digital mammograms as crucial to unbiased and well-formed research in this field. So, MIAS has generated a database of digital mammograms that is currently used in 11 countries by 57 different institutions. The MIAS holds meetings every year, at which researchers from the various institutions and invited speakers present state of the art work covering all aspects of digital mammography and breast screening in general. Watch this space for details of the next meeting.