Breast Abnormality Boundary Extraction in Mammography Image Using Variational Level Set and Self-Organizing Map (SOM)

A mammography provides a grayscale image of the breast. The main challenge of analyzing mammography images is to extract the region boundary of the breast abnormality for further analysis. In computer vision, this method is also known as image segmentation. The variational level set mathematical model has been proven to be effective for image segmentation. Several selective types of variational level set models have recently been formulated to accurately segment a specific object on images. However, these models are incapable of handling complex intensity inhomogeneity images, and the segmentation process tends to be slow. Therefore, this study formulated a new selective type of the variational level set model to segment mammography images that incorporate a machine learning algorithm known as Self-Organizing Map (SOM). In addition to that, the Gaussian function was applied in the model as a regularizer to speed up the processing time. Then, the accuracy of the segmentation's output was evaluated using the Jaccard, Dice, Accuracy and Error metrics, while the efficiency was assessed by recording the computational time. Experimental results indicated that the new proposed model is able to segment mammography images with the highest segmentation accuracy and fastest computational speed compared to other iterative models.