Whole breast computer-aided screening using free-hand ultrasound

Ultrasound imaging plays an important role in the field of breast cancer diagnosis because of its convenience and non-invasive. Recently, the development of computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) provides a convenient way for doctors in detecting breast cancer using ultrasound images. However, the previous CAD systems have some limits with the requirements of human intervention. Hence, in this paper, a novel automatic CAD system is proposed to find suspicious frames among whole breast ultrasound images. After applying watershed segmentation, suspicious segmented regions can be identified through several criteria defined according to the statistic and geometric features of a tumour. By examining 13 US test cases, almost all the tumours and cysts could successfully be detected when an average of two false positives for each case is produced. The experimental results prove the accuracy of this proposed system.