Fully automatic breast segmentation in 3D breast MRI

In computer-aided diagnosis of breast MRI, a precise segmentation of the breast is often required as a fundamental step to facilitate further diagnostic tasks, e.g., breast density measurement, lesion detection and automatic reporting. In this work, a fully automatic method dedicated to breast segmentation is proposed, which comprises four major steps: sheet-like structures enhancement, pectoralis muscle boundary segmentation, breast-air boundary segmentation and breast extraction. To validate the proposed method, the segmented breast boundaries of 84 breast MR images, acquired in five different sites with variant imaging protocols, were compared to the manual segmentation. An average distance of 2.56mm with a standard deviation of 3.26mm was achieved.