Modified Level-Set for Segmenting Breast Tumor from Thermal Images

Contactless, painless and radiation-free thermal imaging technique is one of the preferred screening modalities for detection of breast cancer. However, poor signal to noise ratio and the inexorable need to preserve edges defining cancer cells and normal cells, make the segmentation process difficult and hence unsuitable for computer aided diagnosis of breast cancer. This work uses a modified version of level-set called marker-controlled level-set for segmentation along with pre-processing. This paper presents key findings from a research conducted on the appraisal of two promising techniques, for the detection of breast cancer: a) marker-controlled Level-set segmentation of anisotropic diffusion filtered preprocessed image versus b) Segmentation using marker-controlled level-set on a Gaussian-filtered image. The proposed method was carried out on images from an online database with samples collected from women of varying breast characteristics. It was observed that the breast was able to be segmented out from the background by adjustment of the markers. From the results, it was observed that as a pre-processing technique, anisotropic filtering with level-set segmentation, preserved the edges more effectively than Gaussian filtering. Segmented image, by application of anisotropic filtering was found to be more suitable for feature extraction, enabling automated computer aided diagnosis of breast cancer.