COMP 775 – Introduction to medical image analysis Project Final Report Nipple detection for mammogram

Reliable diagnosis of abnormalities is often the case that a mammogram of a woman is compared with previous mammograms. The location of the nipple is invaluable in registration, imaging modality fusion, and as a reference point for classifying microcalcification clusters. Therefore, detecting nipple is important for analyze mammogram images. There are many methods for nipple detection, but they usually assume skin-air boundary has been identified, and assume that nipple location should be in profile of breast. A number of proposed method to extract contours of mammograms, but they needs user input to start extracting profile contour of mammograms and stop process. I propose automatic algorithm to extract profile, and to detect nipple location even if nipple is not in profile. For preliminary test image set, this algorithm shows good results.