A Comparative Study of Thresholding Algorithms on Breast Area and Fibroglandular Tissue

One of the independently risk factors of breast cancer is mammographic density reflecting the composition of the fibroglandular tissue in breast area. Tumor in the mammogram is precisely complicated to detect as it is covered by the density (the masking effect). The determination of mammographic density may be implemented by calculating percentage of mammographic density (quantitative and objective approaches). Thereby, the use of a proper thresholding algorithm is highly required in order to obtain the fibroglandular tissue area and breast area. The mammograms used in the research were derived from Oncology Clinic, Yogyakarta that had been verified by Radiologists using semi-automatic thresholding. This research was aimed to compare the performance of the thresholding algorithm using three parameters, namely: PME, RAE and MHD. Zack Algorithm had the best performance to obtain the breast area with PME, RAE and MHD of about 0.33%, 0.71% and 0.01 respectively. Meanwhile, there were two algorithms having good performance to obtain the fibroglandular tissue area, i.e. multilevel thresholding and maximum entropy with the value for PME (13.34%; 11:27%), RAE (53.34%; 51.26%) and MHD (1:47; 33.92) respectively. The obtained results suggest that zack algorithm is perfectly suited for getting breast area than multilevel thresholding and maximum entropy for getting fibroglandular tissue. It is one of the components to determine risk factors of breast cancer based on percentage of breast density.

@article{‘Uyun2015,
  title     = {A Comparative Study of Thresholding Algorithms on Breast Area and Fibroglandular Tissue},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {6},
  number    = {1},
  year      = {2015},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Shofwatul ‘Uyun and Sri Hartati and Agus Harjoko and Lina Choridah},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2015.060117},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2015.060117}
}