Classification improvement by segmentation refinement: Application to contrast-enhanced MR-mammography

In this study we investigated whether automatic refinement of manually segmented MR breast lesions improves the discrimination of benign and malignant breast lesions. A constrained maximum a-posteriori scheme was employed to extract the most probable lesion for a user-provided coarse manual segmentation. Standard shape, texture and contrast enhancement features were derived from both the manual and the refined segmentations for 10 benign and 16 malignant lesions and their discrimination ability was compared. The refined segmentations were more consistent than the manual segmentations from a radiologist and a non-expert. The automatic refinement was robust to inaccuracies of the manual segmentation. Classification accuracy improved on average from 69% to 82% after segmentation refinement.