Yu Shaode, Wu Shibin, Zhuang Ling, Wei Xinhua, Sak Mark, Neb Duric, Hu Jiani, Xie Yaoqin
Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen 518055, China.
Shenzhen College of Advanced Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen 518055, China.
Sensors (Basel). 2017 Aug 8;17(8):1827. doi: 10.3390/s17081827.
As an emerging modality for whole breast imaging, ultrasound tomography (UST), has been adopted for diagnostic purposes. Efficient segmentation of an entire breast in UST images plays an important role in quantitative tissue analysis and cancer diagnosis, while major existing methods suffer from considerable time consumption and intensive user interaction. This paper explores three-dimensional GrabCut (GC3D) for breast isolation in thirty reflection (B-mode) UST volumetric images. The algorithm can be conveniently initialized by localizing points to form a polygon, which covers the potential breast region. Moreover, two other variations of GrabCut and an active contour method were compared. Algorithm performance was evaluated from volume overlap ratios ( T O , target overlap; M O , mean overlap; F P , false positive; F N , false negative) and time consumption. Experimental results indicate that GC3D considerably reduced the work load and achieved good performance ( T O = 0.84; M O = 0.91; F P = 0.006; F N = 0.16) within an average of 1.2 min per volume. Furthermore, GC3D is not only user friendly, but also robust to various inputs, suggesting its great potential to facilitate clinical applications during whole-breast UST imaging. In the near future, the implemented GC3D can be easily automated to tackle B-mode UST volumetric images acquired from the updated imaging system.
作为一种用于全乳成像的新兴模态，超声断层扫描（UST）已被用于诊断目的。UST图像中全乳的有效分割在定量组织分析和癌症诊断中起着重要作用，而现有的主要方法存在相当大的时间消耗和大量的用户交互。本文探索了三维GrabCut（GC3D）算法用于30幅反射式（B模式）UST体积图像中的乳房分割。该算法可以通过定位点以形成覆盖潜在乳房区域的多边形来方便地初始化。此外，还比较了GrabCut的另外两种变体和一种主动轮廓方法。从体积重叠率（TO，目标重叠；MO，平均重叠；FP，假阳性；FN，假阴性）和时间消耗方面评估了算法性能。实验结果表明，GC3D大大减少了工作量，并且在每幅体积图像平均1.2分钟内实现了良好的性能（TO = 0.84；MO = 0.91；FP = 0.006；FN = 0.16）。此外，GC3D不仅用户友好，而且对各种输入都具有鲁棒性，表明其在全乳UST成像期间促进临床应用的巨大潜力。在不久的将来，所实现的GC3D可以很容易地自动化处理从更新的成像系统获取的B模式UST体积图像。
