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Edge-Enhancing Coherence Diffusion Filter for Level Set Segmentation and Asymmetry Analysis Using Curvelets in Breast Thermograms

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Signal and Image Processing Techniques for the Development of Intelligent Healthcare Systems

Abstract

Thermal pattern which shows asymmetry plays a vital role to diagnosis the cancer in breast thermogram. In this work, asymmetrical pattern of thermal images is analysed using coherence-enhanced diffusion filtering (CEDF)-based reaction diffusion level set and Curvelet transform (CT). The breast tissues are segmented using reaction diffusion level set method (RDLSM). Development of edge map generated by CEDF acts as edge indicator in this level set. The regions of left and right breast from the segmented images are separated. The categories of abnormal and normal sets have been established by pathological and healthy conditions from the separated regions. Three levels of Curvelet decomposition are performed on these tissues, and features of texture such as contrast, dissimilarity and difference of variance are determined from the extracted Curvelet coefficients. The results show that coherence-enhanced diffusion filter-based RDLSM is able to segment the regions of breast. This technique shows the correlation between the ground truth and segmented output as high value than the conventional level set. CT offers the directional information as more than wavelet and ridgelet transform. Therefore, grey-level co-occurrence features extracted from the coefficients of CT are noticed to be important in delineating the tissues of normal and abnormal breast. Hence, it seems that this can be used in the automated detection of asymmetry in breast thermograms for efficient diagnosis of breast cancer.

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Prabha, S. (2021). Edge-Enhancing Coherence Diffusion Filter for Level Set Segmentation and Asymmetry Analysis Using Curvelets in Breast Thermograms. In: Priya, E., Rajinikanth, V. (eds) Signal and Image Processing Techniques for the Development of Intelligent Healthcare Systems. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6141-2_3

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