For capturing various shapes and blurry margins of tumors

a new mass detection method based on Morphological Component Analysis (MCA) and adaptive histogram threshold searching is proposed in this paper.Firstly

MCA method is introduced to restrain the influence of blood vessels and fibrous structures in mammograms.Then

an adaptive threshold searching method is designed according to the histograms of breast region.Finally

following the Gaussian-like growing feature of masses

the suspicious regions are effectively detected according to the adaptive thresholds and multi-intensity concentric layer methods.The experimental results on mammograms illustrate that the proposed method could effectively detect different types of masses with acceptable false positives

and could be a useful tool for assisting doctors.