Breast mass segmentation in mammographic images by an effective region growing algorithm

Breast cancer is the most common cause of death among women and the most effective method for its diagnosis is mammography. However, this kind of analysis is very difficult to interpret and for this reason radiologists miss 20-30% of tumors. We propose a module for the segmentation of masses that can be implemented in a complete CADx (Computer Aided Diagnosis) system. In particular, we implement a new version of the region growing algorithm specific for this kind of images and for the constraints on computation time of this application.