Patent ID: 8923594

Claim:
A method for identifying spiculated anomalies in an image comprising pixels, the method comprising: generating a bulge mask from a digital image, the bulge mask comprising potential convergence hubs for spiculated anomalies; detecting ridges in the digital image to generate a detected ridges map; projecting the detected ridges map onto a set of direction maps having different directional vectors to generate a set of ridge direction projection maps; determining wedge features for the potential convergence hubs from the set of ridge direction projection maps; selecting ridge convergence hubs from the potential convergence hubs having strongest wedge features; extracting classification features for each of the selected ridge convergence hubs; and classifying the selected ridge convergence hubs based on the extracted classification features, wherein projecting the detected ridges map onto the set of direction maps comprises: separating the detected ridges map into a line mask image, a row component image, and a column component image; and determining a dot product of the line mask image, the row component image, and the column component image with the directional vectors.