Note Jpn J Radiol Technol 2000 ;
Automated Breast Skin-line Extraction in a Mammogram CAD System

TOMOKO MATSUBARA, TAKESHI HARA,1) HIROSHI FUJITA,1)
TOKIKO ENDO,2) TAKUJI IWASE,3) and KATSUHEI HORITA4)
Department of Information Culture, School of Information Culture, Nagoya Bunri University
1)Department of Information Science, Faculty of Engineering, Gifu University
2)Department of Radiology, National Hospital of Nagoya
3)Department of Breast Surgery, Aichi Cancer Center Hospital
4)Department of Diagnostic Radiology, Aichi Cancer Center Hospital
Received Nov. 16, 1999; Revision accepted Jan. 19, 2000; Code No. 532
Summary
One of the issues needing to be solved in our mammogram CAD system was its precision in the process of extracting the breast skin line. Effective skin lines that were not extracted precisely represented about 12% of images, making it necessary to improve our previous method. Therefore, our old method was improved in this study by adding processes for detecting the edge with a Sobel operator and weighting profiles. When the revised method was evaluated using 340 mammograms obtained from 7 hospitals, including 42 mammograms whose skin lines were not extracted by the previous method, it was possible to extract the effective skin lines of all mammograms. This result indicates that our proposed method is effective.
Key words: Automated extraction, Computer-aided diagnosis, Mammogram, Image processing, Image analysis