A spatial fuzzy based level set method for mammogram mass segmentation

The evolution of level set segmentation needs an appropriate initialization and controlling parameters, which requires manual intervention. A new spatial fuzzy level set algorithm is proposed in this paper to facilitate the automatic mammogram image segmentation. The initial segmentation of the mass is obtained by spatial fuzzy clustering that incorporates the spatial information and local intensity information to compute the weighted summed image. The maximum membership cluster extracted from the fuzzy clustering is used as an initial contour for the level set segmentation that is used to refine the mass boundary. The control parameters of level set algorithm also estimated from the results of fuzzy clustering. Experimental results show that the proposed method gives promising results to effectively segment the mass regions in the mammograms.