Automatic Seed Placement for Breast Lesion Segmentation on US Images

Breast lesion boundaries have been mostly extracted by using conventional approaches as a previous step in the development of computer-aided diagnosis systems. Among these, region growing is a frequently used segmentation method. To make the segmentation completely automatic, most of the region growing methods incorporate automatic selection of the seed points. This paper proposes a new automatic seed placement algorithm for breast lesion segmentation on ultrasound images by means of assigning the probability of belonging to a lesion for every pixel depending on intensity, texture and geometrical constraints. The proposal has been evaluated using a set of sonographic breast images with accompanying expert-provided ground truth, and successfully compared to other existing algorithms.