Achieving Standardization in Breast Ultrasonography Screening

Abstract

The complementary role of hand-held ultrasound for breast cancer screening has been demonstrated in many studies. As hand-held breast ultrasound screening is operator-dependent and a real-time examination, standardization and quality control of hand-held ultrasound screening is difficult. Automated breast ultrasound (ABUS) could separate image acquisition from image review. In addition, the scanning procedure can be standardized. Therefore, ABUS has the advantage of being operator-independent and is feasible for breast ultrasound screening. So far there are, commercial supine and prone ABUS systems including U-systems (now GE), Siemens, Aloka, and iVu systems. We have developed a hand-held ultrasound whole-breast magnetic tracking system. This system is an US image recoding system developed by the Medical Image Processing Lab of National Taiwan University. With the sensor response in the magnetic field, the probe position can be tracked and recorded in the system. During the scanning, the probe position relative to the nipple is specified with the degree, clock, and distance. The tracking images and routes are also shown on the screen for real-time reference and are stored for retrospective examination. As a physician still need a lot of time to review the large ABUS images, misdetection might occur. In order to reduce the review time and misdetection by the physician, the computer-aided detection (CADe) for ABUS images has been developed. A region-based tumor detection method is adopted to provide fast tumor detection.