Mammographic mass segmentation using fuzzy contours.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Accurate mass segmentation in mammographic images is a critical requirement for computer-aided diagnosis systems since it allows accurate feature extraction and thus improves classification precision.

METHODS: In this paper, a novel automatic breast mass segmentation approach is presented. This approach consists of mainly three stages: contour initialization applied to a given region of interest; construction of fuzzy contours and estimation of fuzzy membership maps of different classes in the considered image; integration of these maps in the Chan-Vese model to get a fuzzy-energy based model that is used for final delineation of mass.

RESULTS: The proposed approach is evaluated using mass regions of interest extracted from the mini-MIAS database. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves an average true positive rate of 91.12% with a precision of 88.08%.

CONCLUSIONS: The achieved results show high accuracy in breast mass segmentation when compared to manually annotated ground truth and to other methods from the literature.