Segmentation of the Breast Masses in Mammograms Using Active Contour for Medical Practice: AR Based Surgery

Images have been one of the most important ways humans have used to communicate and impart knowledge and information since the dawn of mankind, as an image can encompass a large amount of information concerning the quality of life linked to health and particularly in oncology precisely the breast cancer. New technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) guidance allows a surgeon to see sub-surface structures, by overlaying pre-operative imaging data on a live laparoscopic video. The presence of masses in mammography is particularly interesting for the early detection of the breast cancer. In this article, we propose to use a mass detection system, based on two main axes: segmentation and pretreatment. The latter is based on the suppression of the noise by a Gaussian filter and mathematical morphology (white Top-Hat transform) in order to bring out all the spots (Clear Spots) possible to be pathologies. In the second axis, we are interested in the segmentation of pathologies in mammography images. This consists of segmenting the object of interest by active contour models (Chunming Li). Visually, the obtained results are very clear, and show the good performance of the new approach suggested in this work. This latter allows extracting successfully the masses starting from the mammography referents from the database Mini MIAS. The proposed breasts masses detection can, thus, provide an acceptable accuracy for an AR-based surgery or medicine courses with scene augmentation of videos, which provides a seamless use of augmented-reality for surgeons in visualizing cancer tumors.