Automatic Localization of the Nipple in Mammograms Using Gabor filters and the Radon Transform

摘要

The nipple is an important landmark in mammograms. Detection of the nipple is useful for alignment and registration of mammograms in computer-aided diagnosis of breast cancer. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed for automatic detection of the nipple based on the oriented patterns of the breast tissues present in mammograms. The Radon transform is applied to the oriented patterns obtained by a bank of Gabor filters to detect the linear structures related to the tissue patterns. The detected linear structures are then used to locate the nipple position using the characteristics of convergence of the tissue patterns towards the nipple. The performance of the method was evaluated with 200 scanned-film images from the mini-MI AS database and 150 digital radiography (DR) images from a local database. Average errors of 5.84 mm and 6.36 mm were obtained with respect to the reference nipple location marked by a radiologist for the mini-MIAS and the DR images, respectively.