Breast cancer is the most common threat to the health of women. Breast masses are usually important signs of breast cancer. Therefore, a level set method (LSM) with a shape model is proposed to segment breast masses in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images in this paper. Since the SM proposed by Chan and Vese does not work well on breast mass segmentation, this paper adds shape knowledge into the segmentation method. We first apply the Chan–Vese LSM to obtain a pre-segmented breast mass and then the position and size of the pre-segmented breast mass are calculated to establish the initial shape model. This paper uses dilation processing to calculate the distance to the shape model contour since it takes into consideration the need to update the level set function. Finally, the proposed method is applied to segment the breast mass in the MRI image of the breast. In order to eliminate noise interference in other regions of the breast, we also address the concept of region of interest (ROI). In the experiment, the proposed method is compared with the Chan–Vese method to prove that the proposed method can achieve better performance. The experimental results show that the breast mass can be correctly segmented by the above mechanism.
Automated Breast Mass Segmentation using Pulse-Coupled Neural Network and Distance Regularized Level Set Evolution: A Coarse-to-fine Approach
