An adaptive approach to the segmentation of dce-mr images of the breast: Comparison with classical thresholding algorithms

Abstract

The segmentation of MR images has been playing an important role to improve the detection and diagnosis of breast cancer. Main problem in breast images is the identification of the boundary between chest wall and breast tissue. Minimizing the effects of patient motion is also important step in segmentation process. In image processing, there are many different segmentation algorithms. The most common used method among them is thresholding. However, classic thresholding methods are not effective for axial MR breast images completely because of the fact that the sequence artifacts in axial MR breast images are very high. For this reason, we have proposed a regional thresholding algorithm to segment MR images successfully. The outstanding problem is how to obtain an automatic procedure for detecting boundary between breast tissue and chest wall. © 2007 IEEE. © 2008 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.