Differentiation of breast tumors by ultrasonic tissue characterization

Abstract

The ability of ultrasonic tissue characterization to differentiate and classify benign and malignant breast tissues in vivo in patients with palpable breast masses and in vitro in excised breast tissue was evaluated. One-hundred and twenty-four in vivo and 89 in vitro studies were performed using a technique of UTC based on parameters from the power spectrum of backscattered echoes. Sensitivities and specificities for diagnosing carcinoma were 86 and 84% for in vivo studies and 94 and 92% for in vitro studies. These UTC parameters provided threshold values for color-coding breast lesion images. The results of this preliminary investigation suggest that UTC provides a basis for assessing more accurately lesions suspected of being malignant prior to biopsy and possibly for evaluating breast lesions noninvasively.

Differentiation of Cancerous Lesions in Excised Human Breast Specimens Using Multiband Attenuation Profiles From Ultrasonic Transmission Tomography

“…Our approach is entirely different from these previous studies using echo mode B-scans [12][13][14][15][16][17][18] because it uses characteristic frequencydependent attenuation signatures (MBPs) of On the other hand, the evaluation of the tissue differentiation results in this study was based on the reference standard provided by the pathologic diagnoses and must be viewed with the caveat of the huge difference in the thickness of the tissue volume that each method probes. Specifically, the pathologic slides are only a few micrometers thick, but the "virtual slice" volume probed and characterized by HUTT multiband analysis is on the order of 1 mm (≈2 orders of magnitude difference).…”

“…Because of its potential for assisting clinical diagnosis, there have been extensive efforts [12][13][14][15][16][17][18] to develop computerized methods for automatic differentiation of benign from malignant lesions in the hope of improved cancer detection. These efforts have primarily used the conventional echo mode of ultrasonic systems (called B-scan), which uses backscattered information to provide a qualitative map- …”

“…Because B-scan images are affected by incoherent scattering from tissue microstructures, they contain frequency-dependent information about small-scale structures (<1 wavelength) that are characteristic of the investigated tissues. Early efforts for differentiation between benign and malignant lesions in the human breast using conventional B-scan imaging were made by Golub et al, 14 who reported that some parameters extracted from the power spectrum of backscattered echoes can achieve sensitivity of 86% and specificity of 84% in diagnosing breast carcinoma in vivo. Chen et al 15 used 7 morphologic features accounting for the shape, contour, and size of the lesions with multilayer artificial neural networks to achieve good performance over 271 lesions that was quantified by a 0.954 ± 0.005 area under the receiver operating characteristic curve.…”

Differentiation of BIRADS-4 small breast lesions via Multimodal Ultrasound Tomography

“…Importantly, B-mode ultrasound, as an adjunct examination to mammography, appears to be more effective than X-ray mammography alone for dense breasts [9,10]. The use of B-mode imaging for differentiation between benign and malignant lesions in the human breast has been explored using morphological features regarding lesion shape, size, and boundary [11][12][13][14]. Recent extensions of X-ray mammography in the form of tomosynthesis [15] and B-mode imaging in the form of 3D automated wholebreast ultrasound [16] appear to offer some marginal improvement in performance.…”

Statistics of ultrasonic speckles reflected from a rough surface

“…The emphasis in these studies is on b-scans of ultrasonic speckles in suppressing the speckles for increasing imaging resolution and applying to clinical diagnosis of tumors, [8][9][10]. It should be pointed out that the theory used in these investigations is based on an ideal discrete-scattering model, with the assumptions that a discrete particle is a scattered element and the scattering occurs at the centre of the scattered particles.…”