Minimum Spanning Trees and Active Contours for Identification of the Pectoral Muscle in Screening Mammograms

Image segmentation based on minimum spanning trees (MST) is used to identify the pectoral muscle in screening mammograms. The segmentation found using the MST is used to initialise an active contour for finding an anatomically reasonable estimate of the boundary of the pectoral muscle. The error is reported in terms of the number of in-correctly assigned pixels. Out of 83 images, 25 images have error rates less than 5 percent and 56 images have error rates less than 10 percent. The nature of the errors encountered indicates that the accuracy of computer algorithms for this task is approaching its practical limit.