A region-based active contour method for extraction of breast skin-line in mammograms

Authors:
S. Thiruvenkadam;M. Acharyya;Neeba NV;P. Jhunjhunwala;S. Ranjan
Affiliations:
Imaging Technologies, GE Global Research, Bangalore, India;Imaging Technologies, GE Global Research, Bangalore, India;Imaging Technologies, GE Global Research, Bangalore, India;Imaging Technologies, GE Global Research, Bangalore, India;Imaging Technologies, GE Global Research, Bangalore, India
Venue:
ISBI'10 Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE international conference on Biomedical imaging: from nano to Macro
Year:
2010

Citing 4
Cited 3

Automated detection of breast tumors using the asymmetry approach

Computers and Biomedical Research
A Novel Approach for Breast Skin-Line Estimation in Mammograms

CBMS '05 Proceedings of the 18th IEEE Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems
Active contours without edges

IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
Localizing Region-Based Active Contours

IEEE Transactions on Image Processing

Identification of the skin-air interface in CC- and MLO-view mammograms via computational intelligence techniques

Proceedings of the 50th Annual Southeast Regional Conference
A new multi-agent system for video objects segmentation and tracking based on spatio-temporal descriptor

Proceedings of the International Conference on Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics
Estimation of the breast skin-line in mammograms using multidirectional Gabor filters

Computers in Biology and Medicine

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

In this work, we present a novel region-based active contour technique to extract the breast boundary in mammograms. Skinline extraction in mammograms is non-trivial due to the presence of noise, intensity inhomogeneities, and scanning artifacts. Also, weak contrast near the skin-line boundary, especially in the case of low-density breasts, poses a lot of difficulty in its extraction. Here, we represent the breast boundary by a smooth, parametric curve. The region based data term of the active contour energy is based on the assumption that in a small neighborhood around the skin boundary, the intensity is piece-wise constant. Further, to achieve a good initial guess, we make use of the assumption that at a large scale, the breast image is binary with a fuzzy boundary. A PDE based energy is employed to get the fuzzy membership function. The smoothness term of the above energy allows us to handle noise/ scanning artifacts in mammograms, and allows easy extraction of a single contour, which is then input to the active contour energy. Our experiments on the MIAS database gave promising results as validated by an experienced radiologist.