Pectoral Muscle Segmentation in Mammograms

Abstract

Pectoral Muscle Segmentation is an essential pre-processing technique used for subsequent processing of finding abnormalities in mammograms. The aim of this paper is to segment pectoral muscle region from the Mediolateral Oblique view of mammograms. The proposed algorithm uses the active contour and intensity based thresholding approach to identify the boundary existing between the pectoral muscle region and the rest of the breast area. The algorithm works in two stage; Contrast enhancement and contour identification in the pre-processing stage and thresholding approach in the second stage. The algorithm is experimented with the 322 mammogram images available in the Mammographic Image Analysis Society (MIAS) database. The proposed algorithm successfully segmented 298 images and thus produced an accuracy of 92.55%. The algorithm is compared with the existing methodologies and shown promising results.