Segmentation of Regions of Interest in Mammograms in a Topographic Approach

This paper presents a novel method for the segmentation of regions of interest in mammograms. The algorithm concurrently delineates the boundaries of the breast boundary, the pectoral muscle, as well as dense regions that include candidate masses. The resulting representation constitutes an analysis of the global structure of the object in the mammogram. We propose a topographic representation called the isocontour map, in which a salient region forms a dense quasi-concentric pattern of contours. The topological and geometrical structure of the image is analyzed using an inclusion tree that is a hierarchical representation of the enclosure relationships between contours. The "saliency" of a region is measured topologically as the minimum nesting depth. Features at various scales are analyzed in multiscale isocontour maps, and we demonstrate that the multiscale scheme provides an efficient way of achieving better delineations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has potential as the basis for a prompting system in mammogram mass detection.