# Segmenting Microcalcifications in Mammograms and its Applications

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.00811 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00811/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Feb 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [Training Region-based Object Detectors with Online Hard Example Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03540/) (2016)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks for the segmentation of microcalcification in Mammography Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.03788/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [T-SYNTH: A Knowledge-Based Dataset of Synthetic Breast Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04038/) (2025)
- [MGRegBench: A Novel Benchmark Dataset with Anatomical Landmarks for Mammography Image Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17605/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Microcalcifications are small deposits of calcium that appear in mammograms as bright white specks on the soft tissue background of the breast. Microcalcifications may be a unique indication for Ductal Carcinoma in Situ breast cancer, and therefore their accurate detection is crucial for diagnosis and screening. Manual detection of these tiny calcium residues in mammograms is both time-consuming and error-prone, even for expert radiologists, since these microcalcifications are small and can be easily missed. Existing computerized algorithms for detecting and segmenting microcalcifications tend to suffer from a high false-positive rate, hindering their widespread use. In this paper, we propose an accurate calcification segmentation method using deep learning. We specifically address the challenge of keeping the false positive rate low by suggesting a strategy for focusing the hard pixels in the training phase. Furthermore, our accurate segmentation enables extracting meaningful statistics on clusters of microcalcifications.