The program MammoView was written by Mike Heath to view Mammography images in the Digital Database for Screening Mammography (DDSM) database at the University of South Florida (http://marathon.csee.usf.edu/Mammography.html). This program was not written as part of the grant that funded the creation of the database, rather it was written as a tool for use in my dissertation research.

MammoView will display images in the ICS format used in DDSM, in the format used by the DBA 21 scanner, in the format used by the HOWTEK 760 scanner, images in raw format (using user specified geometry values) and images in 8 or 16 bit PGM format.

Invoking MammoView with no arguments will display the usage of the program. When .dba, .pgm or .dcm images are displayed, no variables describing the image geometry are needed because that information is read from the file. If raw images (i.e. images with no header or images with some other format) are used, the variables specifying the image geometry must be specified. When .ics files are used, the -view flag must be used to specify which of the four images are to be displayed. When the program in run, pressing the right button on the displayed image will toggle the main menu on an off.

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MammoView -i filename | -ics file.ics -view VIEW [-inp #pixels]
             [-inl #lines] [-bpp #bytesperpixel] [-hb #headerbytes]
             [-swap_bytes] [-sr sample_rate] [-w width] [-h height]
             [-view whichview] [-direction DIRval] [-intensity]
             [-density] [-verbose] [-ws #bits] [-manywin] [-version]
             [-segmentation file.sgt] [-detection file.det max#det suspthresh]
             [-l MASS | CALCIFICATION] [-pathology MALIGNANT | BENIGN]

   Mandatory Arguments:
   -------------------
   -i filename         = Input image (filename.dba, filename.ics or filename.pgm).
       --- or ---
   -ics filename -view VIEW = List the ics filename and view may be any of
                 (RIGHT_MLO, RIGHT_CC, LEFT_MLO or LEFT_CC)

   Optional Arguments:
   -------------------
   -inp #pixels        = Number of pixels per line of the image.
   -inl #lines         = Number of lines in the image.
   -bpp #bytesperpixel = Number of bytes per pixel (1 or 2, default is 1). 
   -hb #headerbytes    = Number of header bytes in the image (default is 0).
   -swap_bytes         = Swap the bytes when reading from or writing to the file.
   -sr sample_rate     = Pixel sample rate in microns/pixel.
   -w width            = Width of the fullresolution window.
   -h height           = Height of the fullresolution window.
   -view whichview     = LEFT_CC, LEFT_MLO, RIGHT_CC or RIGHT_MLO.
   -direction DIRval   = Viewing film looking "TOWARD_SOURCE" or "AWAY_FROM_SOURCE"
   -intensity          = Work in intensity.
   -density            = Work in scaled density (DBA, LUMISYS, HOWTEK or HOWTEK_ISMD).
   -verbose            = Print out information for debugging.
   -ws #bits           = Workstation bits (8 or 24).
   -manywin            = Start the program displaying many windows.
   -version            = Print out the version number and exit.
   -ics FILE -view VIEW = Allows the ground truth to be used when -i is used.
   -segmentation file  = Allows the breast segmentation and axis to be displayed.
   -detection file # # = Allows the detections to be displayed on the image. The
                         first # is the max detections to use and the second is
                         the suspiciousness threshold to apply.

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The -ws flag is used to specify whether the workstation on which the program is being run is set up for 8 or 24 bit color. This determines whether or not a private color map is allocated by the program.

Source code is now available for this program, and the program comes "AS IS". Previously only an executable version of the program was being distributed.

• display 8 or 16 bit images in several formats on 8 or 24 bit SUN workstations.
• interactively rescale the image.
• calculate the area and image statistics for a simple interactively specified polygonal ROI.
• display pixel values.
• aggregate the image by several factors to "zoom out".
• display the ground truth chain codes for DDSM cases.
• sharpen the displayed portion of the image using unsharp masking.
• save the displayed portion of an image in PPM or 16bit PGM format.
• map DDSM images to be scaled linearly with optical density.

Basic instructions for using this program are as follows:

• When the program is invoked, a window will pop-up on the screen displaying a section of the image at full resolution. Pressing the RIGHT mouse button in this window will toggle the MAIN MENU on and off.
• Pressing the "FULLRES", "2X AGG", "4X AGG", or "8X AGG" buttons will change the "zoom" of the image to allow you to see more or less of the image on the screen.
• If DDSM case (.ics file) is being viewed and an OVERLAY file exists for the displayed image, then there will be a button labeled "OVERLAY" on the MAIN MENU. Otherwise the button will be labeled "NO OVERLAY". Pressing the overlay button will toggle the display of the chain codes, on and off.
• The "SAVE" button will prompt the user for filenames for saving the displayed portion of the image to PPM (in color) and to 16-bit PGM files. This can be used for extracting a portion of the image. The prompting for the filenames occurs in the shell from which MammoView was invoked.
• The "PIX VALUE" button sets MammoView in a mode where pixel values are displayed when the LEFT mouse button is pressed in the image window.
• The "REGION AVG" button sets MammoView in a mode where the image statistics can be computed for a polygonal region of interest in the image. The LEFT mouse button places vertices of the polygon and the RIGHT mouse button closes the polygon.
• The "SHARPEN" button applies unsharp masking to sharpen the displayed portion of the image.
• The "OVERVIEW" button toggles on and off the display of a window showing a version of the full image. Pressing a mouse button in the overview image window selects a subsection of the image for display.
• The "HISTOGRAM" button toggles on and off the display of the histogram of the portion of the image that is currently displayed. Pressing the mouse buttons on the displayed histogram will rescale the image values. The white line shown under the x-axis on the plot shows the clipping range used in scaling (and clipping) the image values. The image is linearly rescaled to the range 0->255 over the range of the white bar. For example, in the image displayed below, grey level assiciated with optical density 2.448 is mapped to 0 and grey level associated with optical density 0.638 is mapped to 255. Any values outside this range will be clipped to black or white. Pressing the LEFT mouse button will change the lower clip value and pressing the RIGHT mouse button will change the upper clip value. Pressing the MIDDLE mouse button will apply the current mapping to the overview image.

The program was written in 'C' using the XWindows library. It was compiled on a Sun ULTRA-30 workstation with 128MB of RAM using gcc.

The MammoView program relies on a separate image compression program named jpeg. An environment variable must be set so the MammoView program knows the location of the jpeg executable file so it can invoke the program with a system call. The command setenv JPEG_PROGRAM "/home/captiva1/heath/bin/jpeg" works on my system because that is where I placed the jpeg program.

I will accept and appreciate constructive feedback on your experience with this program.