Determination and Evaluation of the Surface Region of Breast Tumors Using Ultrasonic Echohraphy

Conclusions

In this paper, we proposed a method for the determination and evaluation of the surface region of breast tumors using ultrasound echography. The breast tumor volume data is obtained using conventional ultrasound diagnostic equipment with a magnetic position sensor attached to the probe for tracking its position and orientation. The surface region of breast tumor is determined using fuzzy reasoning whose fuzzy membership functions are generated by a three-dimensional Laplacian of Gaussian filter. This deals with the brightness variation of the ultrasonic images, which occurs with the changes in circumstances of the patient’s mammary gland and the ultrasound diagnostic equipment settings. Two parameters, which are the surface area to volume ratio and the standard deviation of the distances from the center of gravity of the tumor region to the surface points, are investigated to evaluate the surface roughness of the tumor for quantitatively diagnosing the breast cancer.

The experimental results for thirty-two cases of malignant and eleven cases of benign tumors demonstrate the efficient and reliable performance of the proposed method. It is shown that the method has the potential to significantly improve breast cancer screening using ultrasound echography.