Breast cancer is a major health problem in the Western world, where it
is the most common cancer among women. Approximately 1 in 12 women will
develop breast cancer during the course of their lives. Over the past
twenty years there have been a series of major advances in the manage-
ment of women with breast cancer, ranging from novel chemotherapy and
radiotherapy treatments to conservative surgery. The next twenty years
are likely to see computerized image analysis playing an increasingly
important role in patient management. As applications of image analysis
go, medical applications are tough in general, and breast cancer image
analysis is one of the toughest. There are many reasons for this: highly
variable and irregular shapes of the objects of interest, changing
imaging conditions, and the densely textured nature of the images. Add
to this the increasing need for quantitative informa- tion, precision,
and reliability (very few false positives), and the image pro- cessing
challenge becomes quite daunting, in fact it pushes image analysis
techniques right to their limits.