Pectoral Muscle Removal Techniques: A review

Breast lesions early detection is the only key to reduce breast cancer mortality rate and increase recovering chances. Computer aided diagnosis (CAD) systems can assist radiologists in detecting breast abnormalities at an early stage. However, CAD systems are facing many challenges such as the existence of artifacts and pectoral muscle on digital mammograms. These components have to be removed from considered images to get more accurate segmentation results. This paper is a survey of pectoral muscle removal techniuques that were developped since the year 2000 and performed on digital mammograms from the mini-MIAS database.