Suspicious-region segmentation from breast thermogram using DLPE-based level set method.

Segmentation of suspicious regions (SRs) of a thermal breast image (TBI) is a very significant and challenging problem for identification of breast cancer. Therefore, in this work, we have proposed an active contour model for the segmentation of the SRs in a TBI. The proposed segmentation method combines three significant steps. First, a novel method, called smaller-peaks corresponding to the high-intensity-pixels and the centroid-knowledge of SRs (SCH-CS), is proposed to approximately locate the SRs, whose contours are later used as the initial evolving curves of the level set method (LSM). Second, a new energy functional, called different local priorities embedded (DLPE), is proposed regarding the level set function. DLPE is then minimized using the interleaved level set evolution to segment the potential SRs in a TBI more accurately. Finally, a new stopping criterion is incorporated into the proposed LSM. The proposed LSM not only increases the segmentation speed but also ameliorates the segmentation accuracy. Performance of our SR segmentation method was evaluated on two TBI databases, namely, DMR-IR and DBT-TU-JU and the average segmentation accuracies obtained on these databases are 72.18% and 71.26% respectively, which are better than other state-of-the-art methods. Beside this, a novel framework to analyze TBIs is proposed for differentiating abnormal and normal breasts on the basis of the segmented SRs. We have also shown experimentally that investigating only the SRs instead of the whole breast is more effective in differentiating abnormal and normal breasts.