Breast contour detection with shape priors

Breast cancer conservative treatment (BCCT) is considered the gold standard of breast cancer treatment. However, aesthetic results are heterogeneous and difficult to evaluate in a standardised way. The limited reproducibility of subjective aesthetic evaluation in BCCT forced the research on objective methods. A recent computer system was developed to objectively and automatically evaluate the aesthetic result of BCCT. In this system, the detection of the breast contour on the digital photograph of the patient is necessary to extract the features subsequently used in the evaluation process. In this paper we extend an algorithm based on the shortest path on a graph to detect automatically the breast contour. The advantage of graph algorithms is that they are guaranteed to find the global optimum of the problem; the difficulty is that they make it hard to enforce shape constraints. We define and compare different techniques to introduce the a priory knowledge of the mammary contour. Experimental results show that the proposed techniques consistently outperform the base method.