How to locate the nipple locations in mammogram?

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Kyle
Kyle on 30 Sep 2014
Answered: Afaf Saad on 12 Sep 2018
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
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Sherif Uni
Sherif Uni on 17 Jan 2016
Hi. Did you finally find an algorithm for your work?
Image Analyst
Image Analyst on 17 Jan 2016
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?

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Answers (2)

Star Strider
Star Strider on 30 Sep 2014
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.)
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Image Analyst
Image Analyst on 30 Sep 2014
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
Sean de Wolski on 30 Sep 2014
And searching it on a standard search engine will probably get me in trouble with work...!

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Afaf Saad
Afaf Saad on 12 Sep 2018
Hello, did you finally solve your problem ?

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