Automatic Breast Contour Detection in Digital Photographs
Automatic Breast Contour Detection in Digital Photographs
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Date
2008
Authors
Maria J. Cardoso
Jaime Cardoso
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Abstract
Breast cancer conservative treatment (BCCT), due to its proven oncological safety, is considered, when feasible,
the gold standard of breast cancer treatment. However, aesthetic results are heterogeneous and difficult
to evaluate in a standardized way, due to the lack of reproducibility of the subjective methods usually applied.
The objective assessment methods, considered in the past as being less capable of evaluating all aspects
of BCCT, are nowadays being preferred to overcome the drawbacks of the subjective evaluation. A recent
computer-aided medical system was developed to objectively and automatically evaluate the aesthetic result
of BCCT. In this system, the detection of the breast contour on the digital photograph of the patient is a necessary
step to extract the features subsequently used in the evaluation process. In this paper an algorithm
based on the shortest path on a graph is proposed to detect automatically the breast contour. The proposed
method extends an existing semi-automatic algorithm for the same purpose. A comprehensive comparison
with manually-drawn contours reveals the strength of the proposed method.