One of the most prominent indicators for the detection of breast cancer is a breast mass. In this regard, effective mass segmentation for any type of mammography is crucial for improving breast cancer detection accuracy and lowering mortality. In order to pace up the process of mammogram segmentation for breast mass, an ABC3D (artificial bee colony based 3 dimensional) Otsu method is proposed in this paper. Firstly, convergence speed of bees in basic artificial bee colony (ABC) is improved by

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... opting the epsilon greedy method for scout bees. Secondly, proposed improved ABC method is paired with optimal 3D Otsu multilevel thresholding technique to get the better thresholding set for medical mammogram images. Epsilon greed based scout bee technique streamline the exploration-exploitation problem of standard ABC while searching for best threshold set in 3D space. The proposed ABC3D is tested on eight mammogram images collected from the authoritative and publicly available database mini MIAS (mammographic image analysis society). PSNR (peek signal to noise ration), SSIM (structural similarity index) and time cost are measured to record the effectiveness of ABC3D method. The results of experimentations indicate that the proposed ABC3D achieve superior segmentation results than the teaching learning ABC (TLABC), ABCDS (directed scout), gbest guided ABC (GABC), improved particle swarm optimization (IPSO) with 3D Otsu as objective functions.