How to locate the nipple locations in mammogram?

I'm working on the mammogram and trying to locate the nipple locations. Sometimes nipple is quite small, it may be in the breast boundary or outside of the breast, so I feel quite difficult to locate it. What I'm thinking is an algorithm to output the coordinates of the nipple pixels in the mammogram picture. Please advise what I shall do. Many thanks

[Sherif Uni]

Hi. Did you finally find an algorithm for your work?

[Image Analyst]

I'd probably try to threshold the whole thing and then get a smoother envelope using activecontour(). I attach a demo. Then XOR the two binary images and take the biggest blob with bwareafilt() (to get rid of any small noise or small things outside the envelope. This won't work for mammograms with missing nipples though, only ones where the nipple sticks out beyond a very smooth boundary.

Star said it's pretty rare to do this -- why do you need to do it?

Answer 1

[Star Strider]

With anything medical, your best option is to start with PubMed. There isn’t a lot published on nipple identification and segmentation, but when I searched with the search string (nipple & segmentation & mammogram) & english[la], I pulled up eight articles. Only one is free, but you can probably get all of them online with your university account or through your university library.

Searching with (nipple & location & mammogram) & english[la] pulled up 45 but they didn’t all look as relevant. Experiment with other search strategies.

Click on ‘Display Settings’ at the top, and choose ‘Abstract’, ‘200’ and ‘Pub Date’ for the most useful display. (I right-click on ‘Related citations’ under the article abstract and open it in a new tab if I find an interesting article.)

[Kyle]

Thank you, Star, indeed it's a quite difficult topic. I gonna dig deeper in those papers:)

[Star Strider]

My pleasure!

Whenever I have a question on biomedical signal processing, image processing, or anything else medical, I go to the literature to see if someone else has already figured it out. There are also some File Exchange contributions that came up when I searched on mammogram. You might find some of them helpful as well. (I’m an Internist, not a Radiologist, so I always go to the literature for medical image processing questions, at least in part because there are likely specific problems in medical imaging that I might not be aware of but are familiar to Radiologists, and that might not be shared by other imaging applications.)

[Image Analyst]

Another good reference is Vision Bib which is a bibliography of nearly all image processing articles ever published (or so it seems).

[Sean de Wolski]

And searching it on a standard search engine will probably get me in trouble with work...!

Answer 2

[Afaf Saad]

Hello, did you finally solve your problem ?