Selection of suspicious ROIs in breast DCE-MRI

Abstract

Dynamic Contrast Enhanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging (DCE-MRI) could be helpful in screening high-risk women and in staging newly diagnosed breast cancer patients. Selection of suspicious regions of interest (ROIs) is a critical pre-processing step in DCE-MRI data evaluation. The aim of this work is to develop and evaluate a method for automatic selection of suspicious ROIs for breast DCE-MRI. The proposed algorithm includes three steps: (i) breast mask segmentation via intensity threshold estimation; (ii) morphological operations for hole-filling and leakage removal; (iii) suspicious ROIs extraction. The proposed approach has been evaluated, using adequate metrics, with respect to manual ROI selection performed, on ten patients, by an expert radiologist. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.