Breast Contour Detection on Digital Mammogram

Mammography is the best method for early mass detection. In order to limit the search for abnormalities by computer aided diagnosis (CAD) systems to the region of the breast without undue influence from the background of the mammogram, extraction of the breast contour is necessary. Also breast contour helps to find the position of the nipple, which its position is important for mass detection in the next stages. In this paper we propose an algorithm based on polynomial modeling to detect breast contour. The proposed method applied to 90 mammograms from Mammography Image Analysis Society (MIAS) database. Evaluation of the breast contour detected in the mammograms was performed by the Hausdorff distance measure (HDM) and also the mean of absolute error distance measure (MAEDM) based on a distance transform and image algebra between the edges identified by radiologists and by the proposed method. The accuracy of contour detection was about 98%