Interactive segmentation of the breast region from digitized mammograms with united snakes

The segmentation of a digital mammogram into breast region and film background is a necessary prerequisite in the computer-assisted diagnosis of mammograms. The segmentation method should be robust enough to handle a wide variety of digital mammograms obtained from different image acquisition systems. In addition, the large size of digitized mammograms requires an efficient image processing system. In this paper, a sofware package called United Snakes for interactive medical image segmentation is evaluated for segmenting the breast region from mammograms. The united snakes technique combines the livewire method with a group of most important snake variants united within a general framework. The advantages of the system are generality, accuracy, ease of use and robustness. Practical tests showed that the method gives an accurate segmentation result with only few user interactions.