Breast tumor segmentation in mammography image via Chan-Vese technique

Abstract

The accurate segmentation of tumours is a crucial stage of diagnosis and treatment, reducing the damage that breast cancer causes, which is the most common type of cancer among women, especially after the age of forty. The task of segmenting breast tumours in mammograms is very difficult, as its difficulty lies in the lack of contrast between the tumour and the surrounding breast tissue, especially when dealing with small tumours that are not clear boundaries and hidden under the tissues. As algorithms often lose an automatic path toward the boundaries of the tumour at try to determine the site of this type of tumour. The study aims to create a clear contrast between the tumour and the healthy breast area. For this purpose, we used a Gaussian filter as a pre-processing as it works to intensify the low-frequency components while reducing the high-frequency components as the breast structure is enhanced and noise suppression. Then, CLAHE was used to improve the contrast of the image, which increases the contrast between the tumour and the surrounding tissue and sharpens the edges of the tumour. Next, the tumour was segmented by using the Chan-Vese method with appropriate parameters defined. The proposed method was applied to all abnormal mammogram images taken from a publicly available mini-MIAS database. The proposed model was tested in two ways, the first is statistical that got results (90.1, 94.8, 95.5, 92.1, 99.5) for Jaccard, Dice, PF-Score, precision, and sensitivity respectively. And the other is based on the segmented region's characteristics that results showed the algorithm could identify the tumour with high efficiency.