Breast skin-line detection using dynamic programming

In this paper, we present a novel method to extract the breast skin-line based on dynamic programming. Skin-line extraction is an important preprocessing step in CAD systems; however, it is a challenging problem due to the presence of noise, underexposed regions, which results in a low contrast area near the skin-air interface, and artifacts such as labels. Our proposal utilizes the stroma edge to constrain searching for the border. In order to cope with noise, we consider several candidate points for the border interface which are obtained by the Laplace operator applied in pre-defined directions in the mammogram. The breast contour is obtained from the candidate points using a dynamic programming algorithm. This utilizes a criterion of optimality to obtain the optimum contour by minimization of a cost function. The method was evaluated using 82 mammograms whose contour were manually extracted by a radiologist from the mini- MIAS database. The Polyline Distance Measure was evaluated for each contour selected with the proposed method, obtaining a mean error of 2.05 pixels and a standard deviation of 0.80.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

MLO Mammogram Pectoral Masking with Ensemble of MSER and Slope Edge Detection and Extensive Pre-Processing

Breast Cancer is a fatal disease. Several people are losing their lives as a result of Breast Cancer. Mammography is the most often used Breast screening modality where we can see both mass and microcalcifications and both are the two major indicators of Breast Cancer. We can see Pectoral muscle also on MLO Mammograms. Digital Image Processing based computer aided diagnosis systems are being used widely to help the radiologist in detecting mass and microcalcifications in MLO Mammograms. However, because the intensity levels of the Pectoral muscle are similar to masses, in computer aided diagnosis system, Pectoral presence in the Mammogram has a detrimental effect on identifying mass. Therefore, in computer aided diagnosis system, Pectoral muscle masking substantially enhances lesion detection. This study suggests a novel ensemble computer aided diagnosis system strategy that combines the MSER based and SlopeEdgeDetection methods with extensive pre-processing to identify and cover Pectoral muscle from MLO Mammograms. The results demonstrate that the new procedure is straightforward and improves the precision of Pectoral region covering. Compared to the average accuracy of the state-of-the-art solutions which is 94%, the suggested technique achieves an accuracy of 99%. Performance analysis makes use of the Mini-MIAS database

Automatic breast-line and pectoral muscle segmentation

Pre-processing of mammograms is a crucial step in computer-aided analysis systems. The aim of segmentation is to extract a breast region by estimation of a breast skin-line and a pectoral muscle as well as removing radiographic artifacts and the background of the mammogram. Knowledge of the breast contour also allows further analysis of breast abnormalities such as bilateral asymmetry. In this paper we propose a fully automatic algorithm for segmentation of a breast region, based on two types of global image thresholding: the multi-level Otsu and minimizing the measure of fuzziness as well as the gradient estimation and linear regression. The results of our experiments showed that our method can be used to find a breast line and a pectoral muscle accuratel

Mass segmentation using a combined method for cancer detection

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer death for women all over the world and mammography is thought of as one of the main tools for early detection of breast cancer. In order to detect the breast cancer, computer aided technology has been introduced. In computer aided cancer detection, the detection and segmentation of mass are very important. The shape of mass can be used as one of the factors to determine whether the mass is malignant or benign. However, many of the current methods are semi-automatic. In this paper, we investigate fully automatic segmentation method.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In this paper, a new mass segmentation algorithm is proposed. In the proposed algorithm, a fully automatic marker-controlled watershed transform is proposed to segment the mass region roughly, and then a level set is used to refine the segmentation. For over-segmentation caused by watershed, we also investigated different noise reduction technologies. Images from DDSM were used in the experiments and the results show that the new algorithm can improve the accuracy of mass segmentation.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The new algorithm combines the advantages of both methods. The combination of the watershed based segmentation and level set method can improve the efficiency of the segmentation. Besides, the introduction of noise reduction technologies can reduce over-segmentation.</p

Automatic breast-line and pectoral muscle segmentation

Pre-processing of mammograms is a crucial step in computer-aided analysis systems. The aim of segmentation is to extract a breast region by estimation of a breast skin-line and a pectoral muscle as well as removing radiographic artifacts and the background of the mammogram. Knowledge of the breast contour also allows further analysis of breast abnormalities such as bilateral asymmetry. In this paper we propose a fully automatic algorithm for segmentation of a breast region, based on two types of global image thresholding: the multi-level Otsu and minimizing the measure of fuzziness as well as the gradient estimation and linear regression. The results of our experiments showed that our method can be used to find a breast line and a pectoral muscle accuratel

Automated breast profile segmentation for ROI detection using digital mammograms

Abstract—Mammography is currently the most effective imaging modality used by radiologists for the screening of breast cancer. Finding an accurate, robust and efficient breast profile segmentation technique still remains a challenging problem in digital mammography. Extraction of the breast profile region and the pectoral muscle is an essential pre-processing step in the process of computer-aided detection. Primarily it allows the search for abnormalities to be limited to the region of the breast tissue without undue influence from the background of the mammogram. The presence of pectoral muscle in mammograms biases detection procedures, which recommends removing the pectoral muscle during mammogram pre-processing. In this paper we explore an automated technique for mammogram segmentation. The proposed algorithm uses morphological preprocessing and seeded region growing (SRG) algorithm in order to: (1) remove digitization noises, (2) suppress radiopaque artifacts, (3) separate background region from the breast profile region, and (4) remove the pectoral muscle, for accentuating the breast profile region. To demonstrate the capability of our proposed approach, digital mammograms from two separate sources are tested using Ground Truth (GT) images for evaluation of performance characteristics. Experimental results obtained indicate that the breast regions extracted accurately correspond to the respective GT images