학술논문
Segmentation of breast tumors in mammograms by fuzzy region growing
Document Type
Conference
Source
Proceedings of the 20th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Vol.20 Biomedical Engineering Towards the Year 2000 and Beyond (Cat. No.98CH36286) Engineering in medicine and biology 1998 Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, 1998. Proceedings of the 20th Annual International Conference of the IEEE. 2:1002-1005 vol.2 1998
Subject
Language
ISSN
1094-687X
Abstract
Segmentation of tumor regions in mammograms is not easy due to the low contrast and the fuzzy nature of the boundaries of malignant tumors. General image segmentation procedures do not consider the uncertainty present around the boundaries of a tumor region. In this paper we present a segmentation method based on fuzzy region growing. The procedure starts with a seed pixel, and uses a fuzzy membership function based upon statistical measures of the region being grown. Results of testing with several mammograms indicate that the method can provide boundaries of tumors close to those drawn by an expert radiologist. The regions obtained preserve the transition information present around tumor boundaries. Statistical measures computed from the resulting regions have shown the potential to classify masses and tumors as benign or malignant.