A STUDY OF REGION BASED SEGMENTATION METHODS FOR MAMMOGRAMS

Lisha Sara Varughese, Anitha J

Abstract: Breast Cancer is one of the most common diseases that are found in women. The number of women getting affected by cancer is increasing year by year. Detecting cancer in the late stages, leads to very complicated surgeries and the chance of death is very high. Early detection of Breast Cancer helps in less complicated procedures and early recovery. Many tests have been found so as to detect cancer. Some of these tests are mammography; ultrasound etc.Mammography is a method that helps in early detection of Breast cancer. But finding the mass and its spread from a mammographic image is very difficult. Expert radiologists are needed for accurate reading of a mammogram. Researchers have been working for years for algorithms that help for easy detection and segmentation of breast masses. Feature extraction and classification have also been done extensively so that the studied cases can be compared to diagnose the new cases. Segmentation of cancerous mass regions from the breast tissues is a difficult process. Many algorithms have been proposed for this. Some of these algorithms are region growing, watershed segmentation, clustering etc. Region Growing Method is based on two major factors which is the seed point selection and then the stopping criteria. Watershed Segmentation on the other hand is based on the basic geographical concept of watersheds and catchment basins, and uses a technique called as flooding. A study of these two major region based methods such as Region Growing and Watershed Segmentation are compared and detailed in this paper.

Keywords: Mammography, Mass Detection, Segmentation, Region growing, and Watershed Segmentation

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2013.0212070