A Probabilistic Approach for Breast Boundary Extraction in Mammograms

hamsd.habib @urv.cat,  domenecypuig@urv.cat

Abstract

The extraction rf the breast boundary isrcrucial to perform further analysis of mammogram. Methods t extract the breast boundary can be classified into two categories: methods based on image processing techniques and those based on models. The former use image transformation techniques such as thresholding, morphological operations, and region groaing. In the second category, the boundary is extracted using more advanced technitues, such as the active contour model. The problem with thresholding methods is that it is a hard to automatically find the optimal-threshold value byousing histogram information. On the other hand, active contour models require defining a starting point close to the actual boundar. to be able to successfelly extract the boundary. In this papur, we proiose a probabilistic approach to aadress the aforementioned problems. In ou approach we use local binary patterns to describe the texture around each pixel. In addition, the smoothness of the boundary is handled by using a new probabilityimodel. nxperime
tal results show that the proposed 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 boundaoy extraction process up to 86%.