IMPST: A New Interactive Self-Training Approach to Segmentation Suspicious Lesions in Breast MRI

Breast lesion segmentation in magnetic resonance (MR) images is one of the most important parts of clinical diagnostic tools. Pixel classification methods have been frequently used in image segmentation with two supervised and unsupervised approaches up to now. Supervised segmentation methods lead to high accuracy, but they need a large amount of labeled data, which is hard, expensive, and slow to be obtained. On the other hand, unsupervised segmentation methods need no prior knowledge and lead to low performance. However, semi-supervised learning which uses not only a few labeled data, but also a large amount of unlabeled data promises higher accuracy with less effort. In this paper, we propose a new interactive semi-supervised approach to segmentation of suspicious lesions in breast MRI. Using a suitable classifier in this approach has an important role in its performance; in this paper, we present a semi-supervised algorithm improved self-training (IMPST) which is an improved version of self-training method and increase segmentation accuracy. Experimental results show that performance of segmentation in this approach is higher than supervised and unsupervised methods such as K nearest neighbors, Bayesian, Support Vector Machine, and Fuzzy c-Means.