Automatic breast-line and pectoral muscle segmentation

Pre-processing of mammograms is a crucial step in computer-aided analysis systems. The aim of segmentation is to extract a breast region by estimation of a breast skin-line and a pectoral muscle as well as removing radiographic artifacts and the background of the mammogram. Knowledge of the breast contour also allows further analysis of breast abnormalities such as bilateral asymmetry. In this paper we propose a fully automatic algorithm for segmentation of a breast region, based on two types of global image thresholding: the multi-level Otsu and minimizing the measure of fuzziness as well as the gradient estimation and linear regression. The results of our experiments showed that our method can be used to find a breast line and a pectoral muscle accurately