Level set contouring for breast tumor in sonography

The echogenicity, echotexture, shape, and contour of a lesion are revealed to be effective sonographic features for physicians to identify a tumor as either benign or malignant. Automatic contouring for breast tumors in sonography may assist physicians without relevant experience, in making correct...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of digital imaging 2007-09, Vol.20 (3), p.238-247
Main Authors: Huang, Yu-Len, Jiang, Yu-Ru, Chen, Dar-Ren, Moon, Woo Kyung
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Aged
Breast
Breast cancer
Breast Neoplasms - diagnostic imaging
Computer simulation
Contouring
Contours
Diagnosis, Differential
Female
Humans
Image Enhancement - methods
Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
Image segmentation
Medical diagnosis
Middle Aged
Physicians
Shape
Tumors
Ultrasonic imaging
Ultrasonography, Mammary
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Summary:The echogenicity, echotexture, shape, and contour of a lesion are revealed to be effective sonographic features for physicians to identify a tumor as either benign or malignant. Automatic contouring for breast tumors in sonography may assist physicians without relevant experience, in making correct diagnoses. This study develops an efficient method for automatically detecting contours of breast tumors in sonography. First, a sophisticated preprocessing filter reduces the noise, but preserves the shape and contrast of the breast tumor. An adaptive initial contouring method is then performed to obtain an approximate circular contour of the tumor. Finally, the deformation-based level set segmentation automatically extracts the precise contours of breast tumors from ultrasound (US) images. The proposed contouring method evaluates US images from 118 patients with breast tumors. The contouring results, obtained with computer simulation, reveal that the proposed method always identifies similar contours to those obtained with manual sketching. The proposed method provides robust and fast automatic contouring for breast US images. The potential role of this approach might save much of the time required to sketch a precise contour with very high stability.
ISSN:0897-1889
1618-727X
DOI:10.1007/s10278-006-1041-6