Analysing the curvature of the pectoralis muscle in mammograms

Abstract

One of the most important criteria considering the assessment of the diagnostic quality in mammograms is the pectoralis muscle. In this paper a routine that automatically analysis the shape of the muscle and compute measurements needed to determine the quality concerning the muscle is presented. The method is based on a division of the muscle into sub images and using the Hough transform to compute the slope of each sub images line. The performance to determine the shape of the pectoralis muscle is 95.5% correctly classified mammograms based on 155 randomly chosen images from the MIAS database. Therefore, the conclusion is that the proposed shape analysis method is a reliable method for determining the shape of the muscle. © Springer-Verlag 2003.