A breast region extraction scheme for digital mammograms using gradient vector flow Snake

Extracting the breast region accurately from a mammogram is a kernel stage for the breast mass analysis. It significantly influences the overall analysis accuracy and processing speed of the whole breast mass analysis. This paper presents an algorithm to extract the breast region from a mammogram. The presented algorithm first combines the median filtering, the morphological erosion processing, Sobel edge detector, and thresholding to find the rough boundary of the breast boundary, then uses the gradient vector flow snake (GVF- Snake) with gradient map adjustment to obtain the accurate breast boundary from the rough 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.