Mammogram Segmentation Based-on Marker-controlled Watershed Transform
Shengzhou Xu · Science Technology and Engineering · 2013
Extraction of breast contour is a crucial step in computer aided diagnosis of mammograms.It has the advantage of allowing the search for abnormalities to be limited to the region of the breast without undue influence from the background.Breast region segmentation is difficult because of the tapering nature of the breast.A marker-controlled watershed method is proposed for breast region segmentation on mammograms.First,the segmentation function is determined on the smoothed mammogram by morphological methods.Then,the internal and external markers are calculated on basis of a improved Otsu method and morphological operations.Results are evaluated by comparison with gold standard for a set of 120 mammograms.The mean±std of the values of the area overlap metric for our method is 0.93±0.03.The experimental results indicate that the algorithm can effectively improve the accuracy of breast region segmentation on mammogram.