1. A method for computer aided detection of anatomical abnormalities in medical images comprising the steps of: providing a plurality of abnormality candidates and features of said abnormality candidates; and classifying said abnormality candidates as true positives or false positives using a hierarchical cascade of linear classifiers of the form sign(w T x+b), wherein x is a feature vector, w is a weighting vector and b is a model parameter, wherein different weights are used to penalize false negatives and false positives, and wherein more complex features are used for each successive stage of said cascade of classifiers.