Estimation of the skin-air interface in mammograms using level sets

Abstract

A method for the estimation of the breast contour in mammograms is presented. Segmentation of the breast region from the background is made difficult due to the fact that the compressed breast edge is mostly composed of adipose tissue that is radiolucent. The algorithm presented uses level sets to establish the corresponding skin-air boundary. An initial preprocessing procedure is performed where the image contrast is improved and the breast edge is enhanced. Artifacts, labels and noise are also removed from the mammogram. Following the breast boundary is identified using the level set formulation, by Chan and Vese, and the results are quantitatively evaluated against the radiologist's ground truth.