A new approach in breast image registration

According to the World Health Organization, breast cancer is the most common cancer suffered by women in the world, which during the last two decades, has increased the women mortality in developing countries. Mammography is the best method used for the screening; the problem of detecting possible cancer areas is very complex due, on one hand, to the diversity in shape of the ill tissue and, on the other hand, to the poorly defined border between the healthy and the cancerous zone. An automated technique for the alignment of right and left breast images has been developed for use in the computerized analysis of bilateral breast images. Using this technique, the breast region is firstly identified by using an adaptive thresholding algorithm. The focus is on determining control points in the two mamograms; these points are used to put the two mammograms into correspondence. The algorithm´s performance was evaluated on a large number of difficult cases and found to be adequate.