(IJCSIS) International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security,
Breast Contour Extraction and Pectoral MuscleSegmentation in Digital Mammograms
Arun Kumar M.N
Research Scholar, Department of Electronics andCommunication EngineeringP.E.S. College of EngneeringMandya, Indiaakmar_mn11@rediffmail.com
H.S. Sheshadri
Department of Electronics and CommunicationEngineeringP.E.S. College of EngineringMandya, Indiahssheshadri@hotmail.com
Abstract
Breast cancer is one of the major causes of fatalityamong women aged above 40. Digital mammography is used byradiologists for analysis and interpretation of cancer. Visualreading and interpretation of mammograms is a very demandingand expensive job. Even well-trained experts may have aninterobserve variation rate of 65-75 percent. Extraction of thebreast contour and pectoral muscle segmentation is necessary inorder to limit the search for abnormalities by Computer AidedDiagnosis (CAD). A new technique for breast border extractionand pectoral muscle segmentation is explored in this paper. Thetechnique is applied to 250 MIAS mammograms. This methodhas given about 98% in segmenting the pectoral muscle
.
Keywords –Image Processing, mammography, morphology, filter,edge detection.
I. INTRODUCTIONOne of the leading causes of death among women is thebreast cancer. Early diagnosis and subsequent treatment cansignificantly improve the chance of survival for patients withbreast cancer. Most effective method for the detection of earlybreast cancer is mammography. Mammograms are among themost difficult radiological images to interpret by radiologists.Studies have shown that radiologists do not detect all breastcancers that are retrospectively detected on the mammograms.Detection is the ability to identify potential abnormalities,such as microcalcification, masses, and architecturaldistortions. Diagnosis is the ability to characterize or classifya detected abnormal entity as being either benign or malignant.However, before CADe algorithms can perform their task of identifying suspicious regions in a mammogram, a series of pre-processing steps must be taken. These include:mammogram orientation, label and artifact removal,mammogram enhancement, breast contour detection andpectoral muscle segmentationMany computer algorithms [1, 2, 3] have been proposedfor automating various aspects of detecting the presence of cancer in mammograms. While detection rates for automaticsystems are quite high, the false positive detection rates arealso high. Accordingly, work continues on improving allaspects of computer-aided detection (CAD) formammography. Implementation of breast border detection,because of some factors such as the low contrast near theborders, image noise and artifacts is complicated.In mammogram, image processing [27-31] and computer-aided diagnosis of breast cancer breast segmentation is animportant pre-processing step. The accuracy and efficiency of processing algorithms will be increased if the processing islimited to a specific target region in an image.Extracting the pectoral muscle [23, 24, 25] is particularlyimportant in automated mammogram image assessment.Segmentation of the pectoral muscle is a non-trivial, complexand demanding task. It is also complicated further by anumber of factors. Foremost thing is, the muscle edge is not astraight line, but can be convex, concave or a mixture of both.Secondly muscle edge though may appear to be visuallycontinuous; the edge exhibits variations in texture andsharpness. This paper describes a new technique for extractingthe breast border and segmenting the pectoral muscle of digitalmammograms.The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. InSection 2, the approaches to extraction of breast border andsegmentation of pectoral muscle are described. The theory andproposed techniques are presented in Section 3. Experimentalresults are given and discussed in Section 4. Finally, the paperis summarized in Section 5.II. PREVIOUS APPROACHES TO BREAST BORDEREXTRACTION AND PECTORAL MUSCLESEGMENTATIONThere have been various approaches to the task of isolating the breast region.
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(IJCSIS) International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security,
M. Wirth et al. developed an algorithm [1] that usesmorphological preprocessing and fuzzy rule-based algorithmfor breast region extraction. Kostas Marias et al. [2] used theboundary extraction technique based on a combination of theHough transform followed by image gradient operators andmorphology in order to make coherent the breast region part of the image. Histogram equalization and thresholding processare employed by Barba J. Leiner et al. [3] to extract only theregion of the image that corresponds to the breast.Segmentation of the breast region in mammograms hastraditionally been achieved using methods besides activecontours [4]. Semmlow et al. [5] used a spatial filter and Sobeledge detector to locate the breast boundary onxeromammograms. Global thresholding has been used inmany cases to segment the breast region from the background[6-7]. The major problem with using global thresholding is thenonuniform background region, although efforts, such as thatof Masek et al. [8] using local thresholding have shown morepromise.A system of masking images with different thresholds tofind the breast edge is developed by Abdel-Mottaleb et al. [9].Gradient based method is proposed by Méndez et al. [10] tofind the breast contour. They used a two level thresholdingtechnique to isolate the breast region of the mammogram. Thesmoothed mammogram is divided into three regions and thena tracking algorithm is applied to the mammogram to detectthe border. Bick et al. [11] proposed a global segmentationapproach that incorporates aspects of thresholding, regiongrowing and morphological filtering. Lou et al. [12] proposeda method based on the assumption that the trace of intensityvalues from the breast region to the air-background is amonotonic decreasing function.One of the inherent limitations of these methods is thefact that very few of them preserve the skin or nipple. Themost promising method of extracting the breast contourfocuses on modeling the non-breast region of a mammogramusing a polynomial method, as described by Chandrasekharand Attikiouzel [13, 14].Maysam Shahedi et al. proposed a new algorithm [15] forautomatic breast border detection in digital mammogramsbased on local adaptive thresholding method. RoshanDharshana Yapa et.al. presented a new algorithm [16] forestimating skin-line and breast segmentation using fastmarching algorithm. They introduced some modifications tothe traditional fast marching method, specifically to improvethe accuracy of skin-line estimation and breast tissuesegmentation.The method proposed in [17] initially determinesintensity value of the background to be able to find pixels thatcreate the border line. Then breast centre has been taken asthe starting point for a simple region growing algorithm. H.Mirzaalian et al. proposed an algorithm [18] based onpolynomial modeling to detect breast contour. Two methods[19] are implemented on a number of mammogram images byAyman et.al. The segmentation outputs of these methods werevery efficient and excellent. Method proposed in [20] appliesthe meta-heuristic methods such as Ant Colony Optimization(ACO) and Genetic Algorithm (GA) for identification of suspicious region in mammograms.There have been various approaches to the task of segmenting the pectoral muscle.A histogram-based thresholding technique is used by K.Thangavel and M. Karnan [23] to separate the pectoral muscleregion. For selecting the threshold value the global optimumis considered. The intensity values smaller than globaloptimum threshold are changed to zero, and the gray valuesgreater than the threshold are changed to one. To betterpreserve the pectoral muscle region erosion and dilationoperations are applied. To segment the pectoral muscle regionthe gray level mammogram image is converted to binaryimage. The white pixels in the lower left corner of themammogram image indicate the pectoral muscle region.Kwork et al. [24] developed a method for automaticpectoral muscle segmentation on mammograms by straightline estimation and cliff detection. A straight line estimates themuscle edge and cliff detection refines the detected edge bysurface smoothing and edge detection in a restrictedneighborhood.H. Mirzaalian et al. developed [25] a new method for theidentification of the pectoral muscle in MLO mammograms.The developed method is based on nonlinear diffusionalgorithm. They compared their results by those recognized bytwo expert radiologists. To evaluate the accuracy of proposedmethod, HDM (Hausdorff Distance Measure) and MAEDM(Mean of Absolute Error Distance Measure) were used.R.J. Ferrari proposed [26] a new method for theidentification of the pectoral muscle in MLO mammogramsbased upon a multiresolution technique using Gabor wavelets.This new method overcomes the limitation of the straight-linerepresentation considered in their initial investigation. Theresults of the Gabor-filter-based method indicated lowHausdorff distances with respect to the hand-drawn pectoralmuscle edges.Mario Mustra et al. [17] uses wavelet decomposition,image blurring and edge detection using the Sobel filter forbreast border detection and pectoral muscle segmentation. N.Nicolau et al. [34] proposed the use of IndependentComponent Analysis (ICA) for identification and subsequentremoval of the pectoral muscle.III. PROPOSED BREAST BORDER EXTRACTION ANDPECTORAL MUSCLE SEGMENTATION TECHNIQUE
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(IJCSIS) International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security,
The block diagram for pectoral muscle segmentation isshown in Fig. 1. Short description of each block is given.Mammogram input
Figure 1: Steps carried out for pectoral muscle segmentation.
3.1
Breast Border Detection
We explored a new technique for breast regionsegmentation using morphological and filtering techniques.The steps followed to detect the breast border involves: -Removal of noise by median filter, Artifacts removal bymorphological operation, Edge detection using Sobel method,filtering, finding the perimeter of the binarized image and thusdetect the breast border.
Removal of Noise
Median filter is used to remove the noise. It is thenonlinear filter used to remove the impulsive noise from animage. Median filter is a spatial filtering operation. In theproposed median filter output pixel contains the median valuein the 3X3 neighborhood around the corresponding pixel inthe input image.
Artifacts Removal
The original mammogram is opened by using a suitablestructuring element. After the opening of mammogram it isreconstructed. Next step is to threshold the difference imagewith 102, which is experimentally obtained. Finallymorphological operators are applied to smooth irregularitiesand expand region. Fig. 2 shows the results of these steps onMIAS image mdb003.(a) (b)
Figure 2: Results for MIAS image mdb003 (a). Original image; (b). Artifactsremoved in the mdb003
Edge Detection and Filtering Techniques
This step uses the Sobel edge detector followed bydithering and 2-D order statistic filtering. The Sobel methodfinds edges using the Sobel approximation to the derivative.Edge detection is followed by dithering. A logical ORoperation is done on dithered and edge detected image. A 2-Dorder static filtering is applied on the image obtained as aresult of the previous steps. The result for mdb003 is shown inFig. 3 after applying these steps.(a) (b) (c)
Figure 3: Results for MIAS image mdb003 (a). Edge detection; (b). Dithering; (c). 2-D statistic filtering
Multidimensional image filtering
This step removes the noises using a multidimensionalimage filtering. A rotationally symmetric Gaussian low passfilter filters the image. After that the image is converted tobinary image and erosion is carried out. Fig. 4 shows theresults for MIAS image mdb003 after applying these steps.
Figure 4: Results for MIAS image mdb003
Find perimeter pixels in binary image and superimpose on theoriginal image
Finally the perimeter pixels in binary image are found.This perimeter is the boundary of the breast image. Fig. 5Mammogram with Pectoral Muscle SegmentationLocate the Region Containing the Pectoral MuscleBreast Border DetectionWavelet Decomposition
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Breast Contour Extraction and Pectoral Muscle Segmentation in Digital Mammograms
Breast cancer is one of the major causes of fatality among women aged above 40. Digital mammography is used by radiologists for analysis and interpretation of cancer. Visual reading and interpretation of mammograms is a very…
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