Breast extraction scheme for mammograms using GVF-Snake

Accurately Extracting the breast region from a mammogram is one of the most important keys for breast mass analysis. This paper uses the median filtering, morphological erosion processing, Sobel edge detector, and thresholding to find a original breast boundary, then uses the gradient vector flow snake (GVF-Snake) with gradient map adjustment to get the accurate breast boundary. The presented algorithm is tested on the digital mammograms from the Mammogram Image Analysis Society (MIAS) database. The experimental results show that the breast region extracted by the presented algorithm approximately follows that extracted by an expert radiologist.