Computerized detection of breast cancer on automated breast ultrasound imaging of women with dense breasts

Purpose: Develop a computer-aided detection method and investigate its feasibility for detection of breast cancer in automated 3D ultrasound images of women with dense breasts. Methods: The HIPAA compliant study involved a dataset of volumetric ultrasound image data, views,acquired with an automated U-Systems Somo center dot V (R) ABUS system for 185 asymptomatic women with dense breasts (BI-RADS Composition/Density 3 or 4). For each patient, three wholebreast views (3D image volumes) per breast were acquired. A total of 52 patients had breast cancer (61 cancers), diagnosed through any follow-up at most 365 days after the original screening mammogram. Thirty-one of these patients (32 cancers) had a screening-mammogram with a clinically assigned BI-RADS Assessment Category 1 or 2, i.e., were mammographically negative. All software used for analysis was developed in-house and involved 3 steps: (1) detection of initial tumor candidates, (2) characterization of candidates, and (3) elimination of false-positive candidates. Performance was assessed by calculating the cancer detection sensitivity as a function of the number of marks(detections) per view. Results: At a single mark per view, i.e., six marks per patient, the median detection sensitivity by cancer was 50.0% (16/32) +/- 6% for patients with a screening mammogram-assigned BI-RADS category 1 or 2-similar to radiologists' performance sensitivity (49.9%) for this dataset from a prior reader study-and 45.9% (28/61) +/- 4% for all patients. Conclusions: Promising detection sensitivity was obtained for the computer on a 3D ultrasound dataset of women with dense breasts at a rate of false-positive detections that may be acceptable for clinical implementation. (C) 2014 American Association of Physicists in Medicine.