A New Method for Detecting Lesion Border in Ultrasonic Images of Breast: Modified Adaptive Anisotropic Diffusion

Accurate segmentation plays a vital role in automated analysis of ultrasonic images. A new method based on adaptive anisotropic diffusion is introduced here for lesion detection in ultrasonic images of the breast. In this method, a hypothesis testing framework is defined first to separate lesions from healthy breast tissue. Then the boundary of lesion is estimated by adaptive anisotropic diffusion followed by energy minimization method. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated on real ultrasound images which are captured from various breast tissues containing different lesions. Parameters for performance evaluation are presented and obtained results are compared with some other state-of-the-art lesion detection methods. Increased true positive rate in parallel with simultaneous decrease in false positive rate, Hammoude distance and Hausdorff distance confirm the effectiveness of proposed method for detecting breast cancer.