Automatic tuning of MST segmentation of mammograms for registration and mass detection algorithms

A technique utilizing an entropy measure is developed for automatically tuning the segmentation of screening mammograms by minimum spanning trees (MST). The lack of such technique has been a major obstacle in previous work to segment mammograms for registration and applying mass detection algorithms. The proposed method is tested on two sets of mammograms: a set of 55 mammograms chosen from a publicly available Mini-MIAS database, and a set of 37 mammograms selected from a local database. The method performance is evaluated in conjunction with three different preprocessing filters: gaussian, anisotropic and neutrosophic. Results show that the automatic tuning has the potential to produce state-of-the art segmentation of mass-like objects in mammograms. The neutrosophic filtering provided the best performance.