Automatic Breast Contour Detection in Digital Photographs

Breast cancer conservative treatment (BCCT), due to its proven oncological safety, is considered, when feasible, the gold standard of breast cancer treatment. However, aesthetic results are heterogeneous and difficult to evaluate in a standardized way, due to the lack of reproducibility of the subjective methods usually applied. The objective assessment methods, considered in the past as being less capable of evaluating all aspects of BCCT, are nowadays being preferred to overcome the drawbacks of the subjective evaluation. A recent computer-aided medical system was developed to objectively and automatically evaluate the aesthetic result of BCCT. In this system, the detection of the breast contour on the digital photograph of the patient is a necessary step to extract the features subsequently used in the evaluation process. In this paper an algorithm based on the shortest path on a graph is proposed to detect automatically the breast contour. The proposed method extends an existing semi-automatic algorithm for the same purpose. A comprehensive comparison with manually-drawn contours reveals the strength of the proposed method.