Automated recommendation of initial mass positions for mass segmentation in digital mammograms

The performance of mass segmentation is greatly influenced by an initial position of a mass. Some researchers performed mass segmentation with the initial position of a mass given by radiologists. The purpose of our research is to find the initial position for mass segmentation and to notify the segmented mass to radiologists without any additional information on mammograms. The proposed system consists of breast segmentation by region growing and opening operations, decision of an initial seed with characteristics of masses, and mass segmentation by a level set segmentation. A seed for mass segmentation is set based on mass scoring measure calculated by block-based variances and masked information in a sub-sampled mammogram. We used a DDSM database to evaluate the system, and the accuracy of mass segmentation is 78% sensitivity at 4 FP/image.