An integrated method for breast mass segmentation in digitized mammograms

Breast mass segmentation is often required as a significant step for monitoring and quantifying breast cancer. In this paper, we present an efficient approach for breast mass segmentation. The proposed method is composed of two steps. Firstly, the marker controlled watershed algorithm is applied to mammograms as an initial segmentation. Then, the contour line obtained by watershed is regarded as the initial curve and a level set evolution without re-initialization is utilized for the further segmentation. This integrated approach yields a robust and precise segmentation. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated using extensive experiments on the MIAS and DDSM databases.