Locating region of interest for breast cancer masses in the mammographic image is a challenging problem in medical image processing. In this research work, the keen idea is to efficiently extract suspected mass region for further examination. In particular to this fact breast boundary segmentation on sliced rgb image using modified intensity based approach followed by quad tree based division to spot out suspicious area are proposed in the paper. To evaluate the performance DDSM standard dataset are experimented and achieved acceptable accuracy.

Breast cancer is a deadly and one of the most prevalent cancers in women across the globe. Mammography is widely used imaging modality for diagnosis and screening of breast cancer. Segmentation of breast region and mass detection are crucial steps in automatic breast cancer detection. Due to the non-uniform distribution of various tissues, it is a challenging task to analyze mammographic images with high accuracy. In this paper, background suppression and pectoral muscle removal are performed using gradient weight map followed by gray difference weight and fast marching method. Enhancement of breast region is performed using contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) and de-correlation stretch. Detection of breast masses is accomplished by gray difference weight and maximally stable external regions (MSER) detector. Experimentation on Mammographic Image Analysis Society (MIAS) and curated breast imaging subset of digital database for screening mammography (CBIS-DDSM) show that the method proposed performs breast boundary segmentation and mass detection with best accuracies. Mass detection achieved high accuracies of about 97.64% and 94.66% for MIAS and CBIS-DDSM dataset, respectively. The method is simple, robust, less affected to noise, density, shape and size which could provide reasonable support for mammographic analysis.

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In this paper, pectoral muscle segmentation was performed to study the presence of malignancy in the pectoral muscle region in mammograms. A combined approach involving granular computing and layering was employed to locate the pectoral muscle in mammograms. In most cases, the pectoral muscle is found to be triangular in shape and hence, the ant colony optimization algorithm is employed to accurately estimate the pectoral muscle boundary. The proposed method works with the left mediolateral oblique (MLO) view of mammograms to avoid artifacts. For the right MLO view, the method automatically mirrors the image to the left MLO view. The performance of this method was evaluated using the standard mini MIAS dataset (mammographic image analysis society). The algorithm was tested on 322 images and the overall accuracy of the system was about 97.47 %. The method is robust with respect to the view, shape, size and reduces the processing time. The approach correctly identifies images when the pectoral muscle is completely absent.