HUMAN BREAST SHAPE ANALYSIS USING PCA

Giovanni Gallo, Giuseppe Claudio Guarnera

Dipartimento di Matematica ed Informatica, Università di Catania, Catania, Italy

Giuseppe Catanuto

Humanitas Centro Catanese di Oncologia, Catania, Italy

Keywords: PCA, Shape descriptors, Breast, MRI, 3D reconstruction.

Abstract: This paper introduces a parametric space to describe the shape of human breasts. The parameter space has

been obtained from a sample of about 40 patient’s MRI taken in prone position. The data have been cleaned

from noise and disturbances and has been dimensionally reduced using Principal Component Analysis. If

two references relative to extremal shapes (one of a reconstructed breast and one of a severely aged breast)

are taken, all the other shapes span a continuum space that provides an objective way to classify and

describe the variability observed in the common clinical practice.

1 INTRODUCTION

Clinical practice for breast surgery requires reliable

objective techniques that may complement the direct

inspection of the surgeon. The techniques should be

the least invasive and at reasonable cost.

Our proposal makes use of Nuclear Magnetic

Resonances Imaging (MRI). This is nowadays a

standard radiological test that is performed in most

of the hospitals. It provides good information about

internal breast structures. It also provides, at

practically no cost, precise numerical measurement

of the 3D external surface of a woman’s breast.

These data are especially valuable if the patient is

put in a standard prone position during the MRI

acquisition.

For this purpose a collection of MRI data

relative to about 40 patients have been acquired with

a homogeneous clinical protocol. Using this data set

we have the opportunity to explore the variability

space of the human breasts and to try to isolate few

numerical parameters able to describe the shape

variations observed in the women population.

We have pre-processed the collected MRI data to

obtain geometrical models of the breasts eliminating

from them most of the experimental noise. These

standardized surfaces have been in turn processed

with the Principal Component Analysis to obtain an

average shape and a small set of principal

orthogonal modes that are able to explain and model

most of the observed variation in the data.

Larger clinical assessment of the proposed

technique is going to be the next step of this

research. At this stage we are already able to present

an interesting way to objectively evaluate a patient’s

breast within a span between some extremal cases.

2 PREVIOUS WORK

The description of the human shape by mean of a set

of numerical parameters has a long history. Perhaps

the first to propose such a way to describe the

human body are the Renaissance artists (Leonardo

da Vinci, Albrecht Durer). Efforts to systematically

measure body shape parameters have been carried

out in military environments (Clauser et al, 1987).

These efforts have been perfected by the availability

of recent laser body scanning techniques.

CAESAR is a joint European and American

funded effort that has brought to the constitution of

publicly available, massive database of the whole

human body shapes (Robinette et al, 1999). Since

the conclusion of this project, studies about

anthropometric measurements based on these public

data have become abundant in the published

literature. Principal Component Analysis has been

used in order to embed the “space” of human body

163

Gallo G., Claudio Guarnera G. and Catanuto G. (2010).

HUMAN BREAST SHAPE ANALYSIS USING PCA.

In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Bio-inspired Systems and Signal Processing, pages 163-167

DOI: 10.5220/0002691501630167

 SciTePress

shapes in some low dimensional geometric variety

(Allen et al, 2003).

As for specific organs of the human body

considerably less work have been done and

published. Regarding human breasts few

experimental approaches have been published both

from the point of view of industrial and clothing

applications (Lee et al, 2004) and of medical studies

(Catanuto et al, 2005), (Catanuto et al, 2008). For

breast evaluation, laser scanning techniques are not

yet sufficiently robust: typically scanning time is too

long and patient’s breathing interferes too much with

the quality of the final data. Moreover areas of the

female torso may remain occluded to the optical

laser ray (Farinella et al, 2006).

As for the use of a parametric model to describe

the shape of the human breast a seminal paper using

a super quadric approach is (Chen et al, 2000).

In this paper we follow the approach of (Allen et

al, 2003) applying the principal modes obtained with

PCA to the problem of describing the breast.

3 PROPOSED METHODOLOGY

3.1 The Dataset

46 MRI of women’s breasts have been acquired. In

all the resonances the patient was lying prone and

left the breasts free to hung down influenced only by

gravity within the instrument.

Both right and left breasts images were acquired

in this way. The volunteers varied in age from 21 to

76 years. The majority of the cases are relative to

healthy women, but some pathological typical cases

have been also included in the study. Care has been

taken not to include extremely aberrated or

incomplete shapes.

The whole volume of the resonance for each

patient is made of 100 slices (50 slices for each

breast).

The rough data present heavy noise and need to

be cleaned and registered in a unique reference

frame for further processing. To obtain acceptably

smooth surfaces we apply the processing pipeline

described in the following section.

3.2 Surface Smoothing with

Polynomial Fitting

Noise reduction at each MRI slice is the very first

and preliminary processing that has been performed

on the data. The hypothesis of additive white

Gaussian noise, with zero mean and variance σ

each slice L is assumed. This allows to separately

process each slice. To statistically evaluate the noise

variance σ

in a slice we sample a reasonably large

region R where, with high probability, there is no

tissue. A natural candidate for R is the corner of the

slice opposite to the breast. The knowledge of σ

allows to precisely tune a rotationally symmetric

Gaussian lowpass filter of size h.

This first smoothing still leaves some amount of

salt and pepper disturbances. A median filtering is

used to reduce this noise without affecting edges and

hence without perturbing the profile of the breast/air

interface.

The precise identification of the breast/air

interface is subsequently performed with a

binarization procedure. An adaptive threshold for the

binarization is found on each slice separately. The

threshold value is determined looking at the

histogram of the pixel values in the region R

considered above. R is relative only to the air and

should ideally appear totally black. For this reason

the natural choice for the threshold value is the

maximum observed non zero value in R. The

resulting binarized images still may present isolated

dark areas within the tissue region and isolate bright

spikes in the air region. These artifacts are

appropriately removed with standard filtering.

To naively follow the border between black and

white areas in the slice at this stage would produce a

very jagged contour while a more regular curve is

desiderable.

Regularization is achieved first applying some

morphological operators and hence fitting a

polynomial curve. More precisely a morphological

binary dilation, followed by a morphological erosion

with a 3x3 pixels square as a structuring element is

performed (morphological closing). Eventually a

local robust regression using weighted linear least

squares and a second degree polynomial model is

used to further regularize the curve. To ensure

robustness the regression weights are assigned in

such a way that probable outliers gets a lower

weight. Zero weight is assigned to data outside six

mean absolute deviations.

The curves resulting from the application of this

procedure on each slice are finally assembled

together in a surface model by mean of bicubic

interpolation. Figure 1 summarizes the overall

process.

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Figure 1: Steps of surface fitting. a) input slice; b) output

of Gaussian filter; c) output of median filter; d)

thresholding; e) morphological closing; f) local regression.

Figure 2: a) Figure orientation; b) average breast shape; c)

d) e) first three modes in order of relevance.

3.3 Principal Component Analysis of

Breast Shapes

Out of the complete data set we have set apart, for

further testing, ten randomly chosen breast shapes.

All the other smooth surface data (36 breast pairs)

have been processed using a standard

implementation of PCA analysis in MATLAB. The

average shape and the first three components are

reported in Figure 2.

Table 1: Eigenvalues of the covariance matrix.

Eigen

value

% λ

61.6 15 5.27 3.77 2.53 2.39

Table 1 reports the percentage relevance of the

six eigenvalues associated with the first six

components. In particular the first three components

explain about 82% of the total data variation. PCA

theory guarantees that the approximation error

introduced leaving the less significative modes out

of the reconstruction is mathematically bounded.

To experimentally confirm that the first six

components are sufficient to produce a fairly good

approximation of the real data even in the case of

extremely deformed shapes, we report the results of

the reconstruction of same real data using only the

first six modes both in the case of normal breast than

in the case of a severely deformed one. The

reconstructed models are shown in Figure 3. The

reader may visually appreciate the faithfulness of

both the reconstructions.

Figure 3: a) a normal breast and b) its reconstruction using

the first six modes; c) a deformed breast and d) its

reconstruction using the first six modes.

The knowledge of the average shape of the breast

together with the principal modes allows the

synthesis of new models. To enable the physician to

interactively explore the patient data and the

potentiality of the proposed modelling technique we

have implemented a graphical JAVA application.

The program makes use of the JAVA3D library to

interactively show a breast model. The model can be

moved in 3D with mouse gestures. A set of six

sliders provides the user with the possibility to

change the contribution to the final shape of each of

the six main modes. Changes in these weights are

immediately visible. Screenshots of the application

are shown in Figure 4a. The freely downloadable

JAVA code can be found at http://iplab.dmi.unict.it.

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4 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

We have tested the proposed methodology in two

ways: reconstruction and guidance to qualitative

analysis.

As we mentioned above to test the expressive

power of the proposed shape descriptors we set apart

as control set a small number of randomly chosen

MRIs (10) for the modes extraction phase and we

reconstructed these left out breasts from the

computed orthogonal modes.

Figure 4: a) The graphical user interface of our JAVA

application; b) Typical reconstruction error distribution; c)

Variations induced by the first parameter; d) Variations

induced by the second parameter.

The control set included cases of fairly standard

breasts as well as cases of great deviance from the

norm. In all cases the reconstruction appeared to be

visually satisfactory although a degree of

approximation has been introduced. The mean error

distribution is shown in Figure 4b. Observe that

most of the error is localized only in peripherical

areas of the breast.

A relevant issue is if each mode may be

interpreted as a morphological macroscopic feature

with some clinical meaning. Although a precise

mapping of the proposed modes to common

properties like volume, roundness, concavity, etc is

unlikely, at least for the first two modes, some

correlation can be made. In particular the first mode

(whose associate eigenvalue weights 62%) induces

mostly volume variations (Figure 4c). As for the

second mode (whose associate eigenvalue weights

15%) it induces mostly variations in the degree of

protrusion of the breast in front of the sternum

(Figure 4d).

These observation suggested the construction of

a linear scale to qualitatively evaluate breast shapes.

Please note that the proposed scale is here just

exemplary: the construction of a well balanced and

universal scale is well beyond the scope of the

present research, but we believe that our approach

may be very helpful in this direction.

Keeping in mind the previous caveat we selected

two extremal breast shapes in our database. In

particular the doctors choose as a reference the case

of a patient whose photograph is shown in Figure 5.

The patient is a 48 aged woman whose left breast

has been surgically reconstructed after the resection

of a tumor, while the right breast has been only

subject to normal aging. These left and right breasts

constitute in a way two extremal cases. It is, in a first

hypothesis, reasonable to believe that all the breast

shapes may span between these two poles.

Figure 5: Reference case: woman whose left breast has

been surgically reconstructed after the resection of a

tumor, while the right breast has been only subject to

normal aging.

To check this idea we computed the “distance”

of the other breast shapes from the two extremal

cases. More precisely, the “distance” from shape A

to shape B is defined, in this context, as the

Euclidean distance in ℜ

between the normalized

first d coefficients in the PCA expansions of A and

B. We experimentally found visually clearer results

for d = 2.

Figure 6a shows a plot of the breast shapes in a

X-Y plane. The X coordinate of each data point

represents the distance of the breast from the left

breast of Figure 5; the Y coordinate of each data

point represents the distance of the breast from the

right breast of Figure 5.

We partitioned the span between the two

extremal cases into 5 parallel strips (S1 – S5). For

each not empty strip we choose a central data point.

Figure 6b shows the central sections of the 4

selected shapes between the central sections of the

two reference breasts. As it is evident the

progression between the two extremal cases appear

to be gradual and of immediate clinical meaning.

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5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

WORK

In this paper we have presented an embedding of the

shape space of the human female breast into a low

dimensional linear parameter space. The proposed

parameterization has been experimentally obtained

from a set of purposely collected and properly

processed MRI data. The data have been processed

for noise removal and analyzed with the PCA

technique.

A first medical assessment of the model, done

using a 3D software especially developed for this

application, proved that this technique may be of

clinical relevance. A tentative qualitative scale for

breast evaluation has been proposed.

Future research to be done in this area will

include refinement and clinical evaluation of a

qualitative shape space, investigation of the

geometrical meaning of the principal modes and

assessment of the correlation between the PCA

expansion coefficients with other medical indeces of

common clinical usage.

Figure 6: a) The X coordinate of each data point represents

the distance of the breast from the left breast (L) of Fig.5;

the Y coordinate of each data point represents the distance

of the breast from the right breast (R) of Fig.5. b) Central

sections of the 4 selected shapes between the central

sections of the two reference breasts; strip S5 is empty.

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