A Breast Cancer Contour Detection With Level Sets and SVM Model

Level sets have been widely used to isolate features of breast tumors in ultrasound images. However, region-based methods always produce multiple contours. Since tumors are regularly undefined from the shadows and muscular regions in breast ultrasound images, computerized tumors location and arrangement is significantly difficult. Therefore, the authors introduce a breast cancer contour detection model using support vector machine (SVM) as a binary classification. Features of the binary SVM model were extracted from level sets and FM method (the fusion of ultrasound, elasticity, and Doppler images). The model was accurately able to predict a correct breast tumor contour from false contours which were segmented by region-based level sets. The proposed method was evaluated on 60 datasets collected by professional radiologists at the Thammasat University Hospital of Thailand. From the experimental results, the breast cancer contours were detected correctly with high accuracy. The percentage of correct detection was 93%.