A New Approach to the Detection of Mammogram Boundary

Mammography is a method used for the detection of breast cancer. computer-aided diagnostic (CAD) systems help the radiologist in the detection and interpretation of mass in breast mammography. One of the important information of a mass is its contour and its form because it provides valuable information about the abnormality of a mass. The accuracy in the recognition of the shape of a mass is related to the accuracy of the detected mass contours. In this work we propose a new approach for detecting the boundaries of lesion in mammography images based on region growing algorithm without using the threshold, the proposed method requires an initial rectangle surrounding the lesion selected manually by the radiologist (Region Of Interest), where the region growing algorithm applies on lines segments that attach each pixel of this rectangle with the seed point, such as the ends (seeds) of each line segment grow in a direction towards one another. The proposed approach is evaluated on a set of data with 20 masses of the MIAS base whose contours are annotated manually by expert radiologists. The performance of the method is evaluated in terms of specificity, sensitivity, accuracy and overlap. All the findings and details of approach are presented in detail

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