Segmentation of mammogram images using level set with Cuckoo search optimisation

Abstract

ABSTRACT Breast cancer is alone accounted for 30% of all new cancer diagnoses for women. Early identification of breast cancer is a key stage in the process of diagnosis and treatment. Segmenting of low contrast mammograms is not an easy task due to irregular mass form, speculated margins and variation in intensity levels. Most of the region-based technique works well for homogenous images but fails for intensity inhomogeneity. Multiphase level set segmentation is optimised by the cuckoo search approach for energy minimisation. The proposed multiphase level set with the cuckoo optimisation method performs well in segmenting homogeneous as well as inhomogeneous regions. The Chan Vese (CV) and the proposed method are applied to the Mammographic Image Analysis Society (MIAS) database to obtain the accurate contour of the masses. To validate the proposed approach using quantitative performance measures such as Jaccard coefficient (JC), dice coefficient (DC), Hausdorff distance (Hd), sensitivity, specificity and accuracy were used for the MIAS data set. The results indicate that the suggested method can successfully segment the breast mass in mammograms and more robust than the classical CV method.