title: Estimation of the breast skin-line in mammograms using multidirectional Gabor filters.
abstract: Segmentation of the breast region is a fundamental step in any system for computerized analysis of mammograms. In this work, we propose a novel procedure for the estimation of the breast skin-line based upon multidirectional Gabor filtering. The method includes an adaptive values-of-interest (VOI) transformation, extraction of the skin-air ribbon by Otsu's thresholding method and the Euclidean distance transform, Gabor filtering with 18 real kernels, and a step for suppression of false edge points using the magnitude and phase responses of the filters. On a test set of 361 images from different acquisition modalities (screen-film and full-field digital mammograms), the average Hausdorff and polyline distances obtained were 2.85 mm and 0.84 mm, respectively, with reference to the ground-truth boundaries provided by an expert radiologist. When compared with the results obtained by other state-of-the-art methods on the same set of images and with respect to the same ground-truth boundaries, our method mostly outperformed the other approaches. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed algorithm.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electronic Engineering, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy. Electronic address: casti@ing.uniroma2.it.
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Casti
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Mencattini
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Salmeri
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Ancona
authors.forename: F
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Mangeri
authors.forename: M L
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Pepe
authors.forename: R M
authors.initials: RM
authors.lastname: Rangayyan
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008327:Mammography / Q000379:methods*; D011856:Radiographic Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012867:Skin / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*
keywords: Breast boundary; Breast imaging; Breast skin-line; Computer-aided detection; Digital mammography; Gabor filtering; Segmentation