Automatic image segmentation of breast thermograms

Abstract

Breast cancer has a great attention worldwide due to the increase of the number of patients, especially women, suffering from this disease. However, breast cancer can be cured if it is detected in its early stages. Breast thermography is a promising screening technique for the early detection of breast cancer. In this paper, an automatic segmentation algorithm for frontal breast thermograms is proposed. The proposed algorithm performance is evaluated using two different databases. The proposed algorithm proves its ability to successfully segment all types of breasts (small, medium, large, asymmetric and flat). Moreover, quantitative measures are computed to verify the capability of the proposed algorithm.