Astronomical Image Processing May Improve Breast Cancer Diagnostics

Over the last few decades, astronomical image processing has become extremely sophisticated, encompassing image reconstruction and restoration, image filtering, object detection and classification. A collaboration from the Space Telescope Science Institute, in Baltimore; Johns Hopkins University; and the Lombardi Cancer Research Center at the Georgetown University Medical Center, in Washington, DC, is hoping to apply some of these methods to detect telltale signs of breast cancer in a digitized mammogram. The project was catalyzed over a year ago by Benjamin Snavely, program director for advanced technologies and instrumentation in the NSF division of astronomical sciences, which recently awarded the collaboration a $50 000 grant from the Small Grants for Exploratory Research Program.