TAF PUBLISHING

Contouring of breast region is an important step in computer aided analysis of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). The volume of breast region is helpful to physician in surgical operation. During the operation, physicians have to estimate the volume of the breast they removed by experience, then put the same weight of normal saline bag or silica gel in human body. Automatic contouring for breast region may assist physicians in making correct decision at surgical operation. However, automatic segmentation is difficult due to several resembling tissues around the breast region in MRI images. As breast MRI becomes more widespread, a functional automatic contouring method is essential and its clinical application is becoming urgent. For this purpose, this study presents a precise method to segment the breast region on each image slice. Then the obtained contour is used to estimate the volume of the breast. The pre-processing of proposed method reduces plenty of noises but still preserves the shape of breast. By using horizontal and vertical projection to extract the region of interest (ROI), the proposed method could obtain a precise contour of breast region.