Key Lab of Nondestructive Testing, Ministry of Education, Nanchang Hangkong University, Nanchang 330063, China; Yangtze Delta Region Institute of Tsinghua University, Zhejiang 314000, China; Japan Probe, 1-1-14 Nakamura Chou, Minami Ward, Yokohama City, Kanagawa Prefecture 2320033, Japan.
Key Lab of Nondestructive Testing, Ministry of Education, Nanchang Hangkong University, Nanchang 330063, China.
Ultrasonics. 2020 Dec;108:106199. doi: 10.1016/j.ultras.2020.106199. Epub 2020 Jun 17.
Breast cancer is a very common malignant tumour that typically occurs in women aged 35-70 years (accounting for 85% of patients). Recently, it has been appearing in younger women as well. Traditional ultrasonic transducers usually use a fixed array, which avoids the radiation from mammography, has a low cost, and can be used for repeated testing. This substantially benefits the clinical diagnosis of breast cancer. However, the fixed transducer-array diagnosis process exerts considerable pressure on the human body, which can easily cause mass displacement or unnecessary pain. Therefore, ultrasound breast cancer diagnosis without compression has attracted attention. In this study, we used a flexible ultrasonic array to record the ultrasound information of the mass, and proposed a mathematical model suitable for breast-cancer diagnosis. Then, we used a self-shape-estimation algorithm to obtain a two-dimensional (2D) ultrasound image of the breast cancer. The algorithm was tested with simulated and experimental array data, and its performance was evaluated according to the tumour location. The surface-shape error obtained through the numerical simulation was less than 0.8 mm, and the deviation in the estimated mass position was less than 1.24 mm. The tumour location was also obtained experimentally in a breast-cancer model. Therefore, the method proposed in this paper can realize ultrasound diagnoses and represents a new diagnostic tool for breast cancer.
乳腺癌是一种非常常见的恶性肿瘤，通常发生在 35-70 岁的女性中（占患者的 85%）。最近，它也出现在年轻女性中。传统的超声换能器通常使用固定阵列，避免了放射照相术的辐射，成本低，并可用于重复测试。这对乳腺癌的临床诊断有很大的帮助。然而，固定换能器阵列诊断过程对人体施加了相当大的压力，容易导致肿块移位或不必要的疼痛。因此，无压迫的超声乳腺癌诊断引起了人们的关注。在这项研究中，我们使用了柔性超声阵列来记录肿块的超声信息，并提出了一个适合乳腺癌诊断的数学模型。然后，我们使用自形状估计算法获得了乳腺癌的二维（2D）超声图像。该算法使用模拟和实验性的阵列数据进行了测试，并根据肿瘤位置对其性能进行了评估。通过数值模拟得到的表面形状误差小于 0.8mm，估计肿块位置的偏差小于 1.24mm。在乳腺癌模型中也进行了肿瘤位置的实验获得。因此，本文提出的方法可以实现超声诊断，代表了乳腺癌的一种新的诊断工具。
