Segmentation of mass in mammograms using a novel intelligent algorithm

In order to improve the performance of mass segmentation on mammograms an intelligent algorithm is proposed in this paper. It establishes two mass models to characterize the various masses, and the ones in the denser tissue are represented with Model 1, while the ones in the fatty tissue are represented with Model II. Then, it uses iterative thresholding to extract the suspicious area, as well as the rough regions of those masses matching Model II, and applies a DWT-based technique to locate those masses matching Model I, which are hidden in the high gray-level intensity and contrast area. A region growing process restricted by Canny edge detection is subsequently used to segment the rough regions of those masses matching Model 1, and finally snakes are carried out to find all the mass regions roughly extracted above. Thirty patient cases with 60 mammograms and 107 masses were used for evaluation, and the experimental result has demonstrated the algorithm's better performance over the conventional methods.