Automatic tissue classification for high-resolution breast CT images based on bilateral filtering

Breast tissue classification can provide quantitative measurements of breast composition, density and tissue distribution for diagnosis and identification of high-risk patients. In this study, we present an automatic classification method to classify high-resolution dedicated breast CT images. The breast is classified into skin, fat and glandular tissue. First, we use a multiscale bilateral filter to reduce noise and at the same time keep edges on the images. As skin and glandular tissue have similar CT values in breast CT images, we use morphologic operations to get the mask of the skin based on information of its position. Second, we use a modified fuzzy C-mean classification method twice, one for the skin and the other for the fatty and glandular tissue. We compared our classified results with manually segmentation results and used Dice overlap ratios to evaluate our classification method. We also tested our method using added noise in the images. The overlap ratios for glandular tissue were above 94.7% for data from five patients. Evaluation results showed that our method is robust and accurate.