Automatic Pectoral Muscle Region Segmentation in Mammograms Using Genetic Algorithm and Morphological Selection

Abstract

In computer-aided diagnosis systems for breast mammography, the pectoral muscle region can easily cause a high false positive rate and misdiagnosis due to its similar texture and low contrast with breast parenchyma. Pectoral muscle region segmentation is a crucial pre-processing step to identify lesions, and accurate segmentation in poor-contrast mammograms is still a challenging task. In order to tackle this problem, a novel method is proposed to automatically segment pectoral muscle region in this paper. The proposed method combines genetic algorithm and morphological selection algorithm, incorporating four steps: pre-processing, genetic algorithm, morphological selection, and polynomial curve fitting. For the evaluation results on different databases, the proposed method achieves average FP rate and FN rate of 2.03 and 6.90% (mini MIAS), 1.60 and 4.03% (DDSM), and 2.42 and 13.61% (INBreast), respectively. The results can be comparable performance in various metrics over the state-of-the-art methods.