1. A method for automated detection of microcalcifications from a digital mammogram image comprising the steps of: cropping said digital mammogram image to produce a cropped image comprising essentially only breast tissue appearing in said digital mammogram image; filtering said cropped image to produce a filtered image comprising microcalcifications; and wherein said step of cropping comprises the steps of: normalizing the brightness values of the pixels in said digital mammogram image to produce a normalized image; selecting a seed pixel in said normalized image; region growing said normalized image starting from said seed pixel to produce a region-grown mask; closing holes in the region-grown mask to produce a closed mask; eroding the closed mask to produce an eroded mask; dilating the eroded mask to produce a dilated mask; and cropping the digital mammogram image to the largest rectangle that just encloses the digital mammogram pixels corresponding to the dilated mask.