Segmentation of the Pectoral Muscle Boundary in Breast MR Images

Abstract

Recently, breast MR images have been used more frequently for diagnosis of that area. Several methods have been proposed for segmenting these MR images, however, these methods are not dedicated to segmenting the pectoral muscle. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a practical and general-purpose approach for detecting segmenting in the pectoral muscle boundary based on the structure tensor. The segmentation work flow comprises four key steps: preprocessing, detection of the region of interest (ROI) within the breast region, segmenting the pectoral muscle and finally extracting and refining the pectoral muscle boundary. From experimental results we show that the proposed method can segment the pectoral muscle exactly. In addition, the proposed method will allow the application of the CAD and registration for various breast images.