Segmentation of the breast region in mammograms using watershed transformation

The author proposes a new approach for the breast region segmentation for the purpose of reduction of subsequent processing calculation and removal of radiopaque artifacts. The proposed algorithm combines the global thresholding method for a coarse estimation of breast region and morphological operations for exact positioning of the breast boundary. 204 mammographic images were randomly selected from the DDSM mammogram database to test the segmenting algorithm and the segmentation results were evaluated by an experienced radiologist. Nearly 95% of the segmentation results were rated as exact segmentation.