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 di- agnosis of mammograms. The segmentation method should be ro- bust 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 re- gion 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 general- ity, accuracy, ease of use and robustness. Practical tests showed that the method gives an accurate segmentation result with only few user interactions.