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AGENCY USE ONLY (Leave blank)REPORT DATE July 1999
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ABSTRACT (Maximum 200 words)This report describes part of a study aimed at developing a computer-based aid for mammogram screening that makes a detailed comparison between mammograms of the same patient acquired at different screenings and detects changes indicative of cancer. The focus of the work in the past three years has been on putting two mammograms acquired at different time into correspondence. The essence of the approach is identification of control points in two mammograms; these points are used to put regions in two mammograms into correspondence. The emphasis of the work in the past year has been on improving the procedure for determining control points, i.e., points that are the same in two images. For this purpose we have developed a model based approach to identify regions of interest in two mammograms. The model encompasses breast tissue characteristics, modeling of compression effects and formation of Xray images. The model is utilized to develop appropriate segmentation operators and the report discusses utilization of the model to detect lobules and ducts. The model can also be utilized for generating synthetic mammograms.Presently, we are evaluating the improvements this approach offers, relative to our original approach, in terms of determining more reliably control points, namely branching points of ducts.