Ultrasonic Morphological Analyzers for Breast Cancer Diagnosis

摘要

The goal of this research is to improve the ultrasonic diagnosis of breast lesions so that physicians can objectively and reliably identify those lesions requiring biopsy. This capability would reduce the large numbers (estimated as 70%) of negative breast-lesion biopsies, avoiding unneeded patient trauma and reducing biopsy-related expenses. A series of ultrasonic parameters was defined to quantitatively describe the ultrasonic backscatter and attenuation of lesions and to quantify their boundary conformations. These objective features were computed for a set of clinical breast data by analyzing ultrasound echo data, acquired directly at the transducer; the data were collected and stored prior to this program. Feature sets were correlated with subsequent biopsy findings for more than 100 clinical cases. The utility of multiple features was evaluated using statistical tests, including Receiver Operator Characteristics (ROC). A set of objective features was identified that successfully differentiated malignant lesions from benign lesions with an ROC area of 0.87 +/- 0.04.