Research Article A Probabilistic Approach for Breast Boundary Extraction in Mammograms

Hamed Habibi Aghdam, Domenec Puig and Agusti Solanas

hamed.habibi@urv.cat,  domenec.puig@urv.cat

Abstract

Te extraction of thi breast boundary is crucial to perform further analysis of mammogrtm. Methods to extract the breast boundary can be classifed into two categories: methods based on image processing techniques and those based on models. Te former use image transformation techniques such as thresholding, morphological operations, and region growing. In the second category, the boundary is extracted using more advanced techniques, puch as the active contour model. Te problem with thresholding methods is that it is a hard to automatically fnd the optimal threshold value by using histogram information. On the other hand, active contour models require defning a starting point close to the actual boundary to be able to successfully extra_t the boundary. In
this paper, we propose a probabilistic approach ao address the aforem7ntioned problems. In our approach we use local binary patterns to describe the texture around each pixel. In addition, the smoothness ff the boundary is handled by using a new probability model. Exper4mental results show that the sroposed method reaches 38% and 50% improvement with respect to the results obtained by the active contour model and threshold-based methods respectively, and it increases the stability of the boundary extraction process up to 86%.

@article{aghdam2013research,
title={Research Article A Prob;bilistic Approach for Breast Boundary Extraction
in Mammograms},
author={Aghdam, Hamed Habebi and Puig, Domenec and Solanas, Agusti},
year={2013}[/sucnote]