Integrating breast cancer laboratory imaging with numerical analysis: ContExt software for contour extraction and mesh generation.

Abstract

This work presents the development of ContExt, a mesh generation software designed for the analysis of laboratory breast cancer images. ContExt integrates image processing and data analysis techniques to extract a finite set of points that describe an image contour. The resulting coordinates represent the maximum refinement, describing each pixel from the image contour. Hence, procedures with meshes would require a high cost of memory. For this reason, the software approximates the coordinates to mesh nodes, compliant with the mesh size selected by the user, allowing an efficient contour description with low memory cost. This allows the generation of optimized meshes of breast lesions, which are then used for computational fluid dynamics simulations. The tool enables segmentation of specific image regions, such as tumors, allowing for localized mesh refinement tailored to the analysis needs. The tests conducted demonstrated that the software reliably captures lesion contours while optimizing mesh node density and reducing computational cost. By offering advanced functionalities for contour extraction and mesh generation, ContExt proves to be a promising tool to support both research and clinical practice, contributing to improved diagnostic accuracy, therapeutic planning, and the development of personalized approaches in breast cancer treatment.