Medical ultrasound (US) imaging has become a prominent modality for breast cancer imaging due to its ease-of-use, low-cost and safety. In the past decade, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have emerged as the method of choice in vision applications and have shown excellent potential in automatic classification of US images. Despite their success, their restricted local receptive field limits their ability to learn global context information. Recently, Vision Transformer (ViT) designs that are based on self-attention between image patches have shown great potential to be an alternative to CNNs. In this study, for the first time, we utilize ViT to classify breast US images using different augmentation strategies. The results are provided as classification accuracy and Area Under the Curve (AUC) metrics, and the performance is compared with the state-of-the-art CNNs. The results indicate that the ViT models have comparable efficiency with or even better than the CNNs in classification of US breast images.
Utah State University（犹他州立大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；University of Idaho（爱达荷大学）；The Affiliated Hospital of Qingdao University（青岛大学附属医院）；The Second Hospital of Hebei Medical University（河北医科大学第二医院）
Tumor saliency estimation aims to localize tumors by modeling the visual stimuli in medical images. However, it is a challenging task for breast ultrasound due to the complicated anatomic structure of the breast and poor image quality; and existing saliency estimation approaches only model generic visual stimuli, e.g., local and global contrast, location, and feature correlation, and achieve poor performance for tumor saliency estimation. In this paper, we propose a novel optimization model to estimate tumor saliency by utilizing breast anatomy. First, we model breast anatomy and decompose bre…
The main objective of this project is to segment different breast ultrasound images to find out lesion area by discarding the low contrast regions as well as the inherent speckle noise. The proposed method consists of three stages (removing noise, segmentation, classification) in order to extract the correct lesion. We used normalized cuts approach to segment ultrasound images into regions of interest where we can possibly finds the lesion, and then K-means classifier is applied to decide finally the location of the lesion. For every original image, an annotated ground-truth image is given to …
Utah State University（犹他州立大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；the First Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University（哈尔滨医科大学附属第一医院）
Breast cancer is one of the most serious disease affecting women's health. Due to low cost, portable, no radiation, and high efficiency, breast ultrasound (BUS) imaging is the most popular approach for diagnosing early breast cancer. However, ultrasound images are low resolution and poor quality. Thus, developing accurate detection system is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a fully automatic segmentation algorithm consisting of two parts: fuzzy fully convolutional network and accurately fine-tuning post-processing based on breast anatomy constraints. In the first part, the image i…
Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hospital of Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学孙逸仙纪念医院）
Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer deaths in women. As the primary output of breast screening, breast ultrasound (US) video contains exclusive dynamic information for cancer diagnosis. However, training models for video analysis is non-trivial as it requires a voluminous dataset which is also expensive to annotate. Furthermore, the diagnosis of breast lesion faces unique challenges such as inter-class similarity and intra-class variation. In this paper, we propose a pioneering approach that directly utilizes US videos in computer-aided breast cancer diagnosis. It leverages ma…
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；University of Idaho（爱达荷大学）；Utah State University（犹他州立大学）；Affiliated Hospital of Medical College Qingdao University（青岛大学医学院附属医院）；Second Hospital of Hebei Medical University（河北医科大学第二医院）
Breast ultrasound (BUS) image segmentation is challenging and critical for BUS Comput-er-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems. Many BUS segmentation approaches have been studied in the last two decades, but the performances of most approaches have been assessed using relatively small private datasets with different quantitative metrics, which results in a discrepancy in performance comparison. Therefore, there is a pressing need for building a benchmark to compare existing methods using a public dataset objectively, to determine the performance of the best breast tumor segmentation algorithm availabl…
University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center（桑尼布鲁克健康科学中心）
Quantitative ultrasound (QUS) methods provide a promising framework that can non-invasively and inexpensively be used to predict or assess the tumour response to cancer treatment. The first step in using the QUS methods is to select a region of interest (ROI) inside the tumour in ultrasound images. Manual segmentation, however, is very time consuming and tedious. In this paper, a semi-automated approach will be proposed to roughly localize an ROI for a tumour in ultrasound images of patients with locally advanced breast cancer (LABC). Content-based barcodes, a recently introduced binary descri…
Tencent YouTu X-Lab（腾讯优图X实验室）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Peking University Shenzhen Hospital（北京大学深圳医院）
Breast lesion detection in ultrasound video is critical for computer-aided diagnosis. However, detecting lesion in video is quite challenging due to the blurred lesion boundary, high similarity to soft tissue and lack of video annotations. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised breast lesion detection method based on temporal coherence which can detect the lesion more accurately. We aggregate features extracted from the historical key frames with adaptive key-frame scheduling strategy. Our proposed method accomplishes the unlabeled videos detection task by leveraging the supervision infor…
Ultrasound imaging plays an important role in breast lesion differentiation. However, diagnostic accuracy depends on ultrasonographer experience. Various computer aided diagnosis systems has been developed to improve breast cancer detection and reduce the number of unnecessary biopsies. In this study, our aim was to improve breast lesion classification based on the BI-RADS (Breast Imaging - Reporting and Data System). This was accomplished by combining the BI-RADS with morphological features which assess lesion boundary. A dataset of 214 lesion images was used for analysis. 30 morphological fe…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Stanford University School of Medicine（斯坦福大学医学院）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
Ultrasound is an adjunct tool to mammography that can quickly and safely aid physicians with diagnosing breast abnormalities. Clinical ultrasound often assumes a constant sound speed to form B-mode images for diagnosis. However, the various types of breast tissue, such as glandular, fat, and lesions, differ in sound speed. These differences can degrade the image reconstruction process. Alternatively, sound speed can be a powerful tool for identifying disease. To this end, we propose a deep-learning approach for sound speed estimation from in-phase and quadrature ultrasound signals. First, we d…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre（新宁健康科学中心）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）
Recent advances in using quantitative ultrasound (QUS) methods have provided a promising framework to non-invasively and inexpensively monitor or predict the effectiveness of therapeutic cancer responses. One of the earliest steps in using QUS methods is contouring a region of interest (ROI) inside the tumour in ultrasound B-mode images. While manual segmentation is a very time-consuming and tedious task for human experts, auto-contouring is also an extremely difficult task for computers due to the poor quality of ultrasound B-mode images. However, for the purpose of cancer response prediction…
University of Malaya（马来亚大学）；University of Tehran（德黑兰大学）
Reliable classification of benign and malignant lesions in breast ultrasound images can provide an effective and relatively low cost method for early diagnosis of breast cancer. The accuracy of the diagnosis is however highly dependent on the quality of the ultrasound systems and the experience of the users (radiologists). The leverage in deep convolutional neural network approaches provided solutions in efficient analysis of breast ultrasound images. In this study, we proposed a new framework for classification of breast cancer lesions by use of an attention module in modified VGG16 architect…
Xiamen University（厦门大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Institute of High Performance Computing, Agency for Science, Technology and Research（新加坡科技研究局高性能计算研究院）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
Breast lesion detection in ultrasound is critical for breast cancer diagnosis. Existing methods mainly rely on individual 2D ultrasound images or combine unlabeled video and labeled 2D images to train models for breast lesion detection. In this paper, we first collect and annotate an ultrasound video dataset (188 videos) for breast lesion detection. Moreover, we propose a clip-level and video-level feature aggregated network (CVA-Net) for addressing breast lesion detection in ultrasound videos by aggregating video-level lesion classification features and clip-level temporal features. The clip-…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（启迪人工智能研究院）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Jinan University（暨南大学）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）
Automatic breast lesion segmentation in ultrasound helps to diagnose breast cancer, which is one of the dreadful diseases that affect women globally. Segmenting breast regions accurately from ultrasound image is a challenging task due to the inherent speckle artifacts, blurry breast lesion boundaries, and inhomogeneous intensity distributions inside the breast lesion regions. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated remarkable results in medical image segmentation tasks. However, the convolutional operations in a CNN often focus on local regions, which suffer from limit…
Graduate School at Shenzhen, Tsinghua University（清华大学深圳研究生院）；Shenzhen City Baoan District Women’s and Children’s Hospital（深圳市宝安区妇幼保健院）；Shenzhen Hospital of Peking University（北京大学深圳医院）；Beijing Tsinghua Changgung Hospital, Tsinghua University（清华大学北京清华长庚医院）；School of Biomedical Informatics, University of Texas Health Sciences Center at Houston（德克萨斯大学休斯顿健康科学中心生物医学信息学院）
Background: Ultrasound is one of the preferred choices for early screening of dense breast cancer. Clinically, doctors have to manually write the screening report which is time-consuming and laborious, and it is easy to miss and miswrite. Aim: We proposed a new pipeline to automatically generate AI breast ultrasound screening reports based on ultrasound images, aiming to assist doctors in improving the efficiency of clinical screening and reducing repetitive report writing. Methods: AI was used to efficiently generate personalized breast ultrasound screening preliminary reports, especially for…
UltrasoundAgents: Hierarchical Multi-Agent Evidence-Chain Reasoning for Breast Ultrasound Diagnosis
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China（中国科学院自动化研究所，北京，中国）；School of Advanced Interdisciplinary Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China（中国科学院大学（大学层面）交叉学科学院，北京，中国）；Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hong Kong Institute of Science & Innovation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hong Kong（人工智能与机器人中心，香港创新科学研究院，中国科学院，香港）
A Concept-informed Interpretable Artificial Intelligence Framework for Breast Ultrasound Diagnosis
School of Biomedical Engineering, Southern Medical University（南方医科大学生物医学工程学院）；Nanfang Hospital, Southern Medical University（南方医科大学南方医院）；Zhujiang Hospital, Southern Medical University（南方医科大学珠江医院）；Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Medical Image Processing, Southern Medical University（南方医科大学广东省医学图像处理重点实验室）；Guangdong Province Engineering Laboratory for Medical Imaging and Diagnostic Technology, Southern Medical University（南方医科大学广东省医学影像与诊断技术工程实验室）；Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence in Medical Image Analysis and Application（广东省医学图像分析与应用人工智能重点实验室）
Institute of Fundamental Technological Research, Polish Academy of Sciences（波兰科学院基础技术研究所）；University of California, San Diego（加州大学圣迭戈分校）
Morphological features play an important role in breast mass classification in sonography. While benign breast masses tend to have a well-defined ellipsoidal contour, shape of malignant breast masses is commonly ill-defined and highly variable. Various handcrafted morphological features have been developed over the years to assess this phenomenon and help the radiologists differentiate benign and malignant masses. In this paper we propose an automatic approach to morphology analysis, we express shapes of breast masses as points on the Kendall's shape manifold. Next, we use the full Procrustes …
Breast tumor segmentation provides accurate tumor boundary, and serves as a key step toward further cancer quantification. Although deep learning-based approaches have been proposed and achieved promising results, existing approaches have difficulty in detecting small breast tumors. The capacity to detecting small tumors is particularly important in finding early stage cancers using computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning architecture called Small Tumor-Aware Network (STAN), to improve the performance of segmenting tumors with different size. The…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of South Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学）；Shenzhen Hospital of Peking University（北京大学深圳医院）
Objective: Breast cancer screening is of great significance in contemporary women's health prevention. The existing machines embedded in the AI system do not reach the accuracy that clinicians hope. How to make intelligent systems more reliable is a common problem. Methods: 1) Ultrasound image super-resolution: the SRGAN super-resolution network reduces the unclearness of ultrasound images caused by the device itself and improves the accuracy and generalization of the detection model. 2) In response to the needs of medical images, we have improved the YOLOv4 and the CenterNet models. 3) Multi-…
Northeastern University（东北大学）；Sino-Dutch Biomedical and Information Engineering School（中荷生物医学与信息工程学院）
Ultrasound image diagnosis of breast tumors has been widely used in recent years. However, there are some problems of it, for instance, poor quality, intense noise and uneven echo distribution, which has created a huge obstacle to diagnosis. To overcome these problems, we propose a novel method, a breast cancer classification with ultrasound images based on SLIC (BCCUI). We first utilize the Region of Interest (ROI) extraction based on Simple Linear Iterative Clustering (SLIC) algorithm and region growing algorithm to extract the ROI at the super-pixel level. Next, the features of ROI are extr…
In healthcare, it is essential to explain the decision-making process of machine learning models to establish the trustworthiness of clinicians. This paper introduces BI-RADS-Net, a novel explainable deep learning approach for cancer detection in breast ultrasound images. The proposed approach incorporates tasks for explaining and classifying breast tumors, by learning feature representations relevant to clinical diagnosis. Explanations of the predictions (benign or malignant) are provided in terms of morphological features that are used by clinicians for diagnosis and reporting in medical pra…
University of Idaho（爱达荷大学）；University of Utah School of Medicine（犹他大学医学院）
Breast tumor segmentation is a critical task in computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems for breast cancer detection because accurate tumor size, shape and location are important for further tumor quantification and classification. However, segmenting small tumors in ultrasound images is challenging, due to the speckle noise, varying tumor shapes and sizes among patients, and the existence of tumor-like image regions. Recently, deep learning-based approaches have achieved great success for biomedical image analysis, but current state-of-the-art approaches achieve poor performance for segmenting …
University of Idaho（爱达荷大学）；Utah State University（犹他州立大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）
Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer death among women worldwide. In clinical routine, automatic breast ultrasound (BUS) image segmentation is very challenging and essential for cancer diagnosis and treatment planning. Many BUS segmentation approaches have been studied in the last two decades, and have been proved to be effective on private datasets. Currently, the advancement of BUS image segmentation seems to meet its bottleneck. The improvement of the performance is increasingly challenging, and only few new approaches were published in the last several years. It is the time…
Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）；Soonchunhyang University（顺天乡大学）；Hankuk University of Foreign Studies（韩国外国语大学）；Seoul National University Bundang Hospital（首尔国立大学盆唐医院）
We propose a framework for localization and classification of masses in breast ultrasound (BUS) images. We have experimentally found that training convolutional neural network based mass detectors with large, weakly annotated datasets presents a non-trivial problem, while overfitting may occur with those trained with small, strongly annotated datasets. To overcome these problems, we use a weakly annotated dataset together with a smaller strongly annotated dataset in a hybrid manner. We propose a systematic weakly and semi-supervised training scenario with appropriate training loss selection. E…
School of Computing, University of Buckingham（白金汉大学计算学院）
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) provides an "end-to-end" solution for image pattern recognition with impressive performance in many areas of application including medical imaging. Most CNN models of high performance use hand-crafted network architectures that require expertise in CNNs to utilise their potentials. In this paper, we applied the Efficient Neural Architecture Search (ENAS) method to find optimal CNN architectures for classifying breast lesions from ultrasound (US) images. Our empirical study with a dataset of 524 US images shows that the optimal models generated by using …
Illinois Institute of Technology（伊利诺伊理工学院）；Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）
Automatically segmenting lesion area in breast ultrasound (BUS) images is a challenging one due to its noise, speckle and artifacts. Edge-map of BUS images also does not help because in most cases the edge-map gives no information whatsoever. Almost all segmentation technique takes the edge-map of the image as its first step, though there are a few algorithms that try to avoid edge-maps as well. Improving the edge-map of breast ultrasound images theoretically improves the chances of automatic segmentation to be more precise. In this paper, we propose a semi-automatic technique of histogram spl…
University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学）；University of Cincinnati（辛辛那提大学）
Image classification is widely used to build predictive models for breast cancer diagnosis. Most existing approaches overwhelmingly rely on deep convolutional networks to build such diagnosis pipelines. These model architectures, although remarkable in performance, are black-box systems that provide minimal insight into the inner logic behind their predictions. This is a major drawback as the explainability of prediction is vital for applications such as cancer diagnosis. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing an explainable machine learning pipeline for breast cancer diagnosis base…
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Guangdong Provincial People’s Hospital（广东省人民医院）；Guangdong Academy of Medical Sciences（广东省医学科学院）
Ultrasonography is an important routine examination for breast cancer diagnosis, due to its non-invasive, radiation-free and low-cost properties. However, the diagnostic accuracy of breast cancer is still limited due to its inherent limitations. It would be a tremendous success if we can precisely diagnose breast cancer by breast ultrasound images (BUS). Many learning-based computer-aided diagnostic methods have been proposed to achieve breast cancer diagnosis/lesion classification. However, most of them require a pre-define ROI and then classify the lesion inside the ROI. Conventional classif…
The advancements in deep learning technologies have produced immense contributions to biomedical image analysis applications. With breast cancer being the common deadliest disease among women, early detection is the key means to improve survivability. Medical imaging like ultrasound presents an excellent visual representation of the functioning of the organs; however, for any radiologist analysing such scans is challenging and time consuming which delays the diagnosis process. Although various deep learning based approaches are proposed that achieved promising results, the present article intr…
Breast Ultrasound Report Generation using LangChain
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）；Chung-Ang University Hospital（中央大学医院）；Chung-Ang University College of Medicine（中央大学医学院）
Is Two-shot All You Need? A Label-efficient Approach for Video Segmentation in Breast Ultrasound
Guangdong Key Laboratory of Biomedical Measurements and Ultrasound Imaging（广东省生物医学测量与超声成像重点实验室）；School of Biomedical Engineering, Shenzhen University Medical School, Shenzhen University（深圳大学医学部生物医学工程学院）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）
College of Information Science and Technology, Northwest University（西北大学信息科学与技术学院）；University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center（德克萨斯大学西南医学中心）
Breast ultrasound (US) is an effective imaging modality for breast cancer detec-tion and diagnosis. The structural characteristics of breast lesion play an im-portant role in Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD). In this paper, a novel struc-ture-aware triplet path networks (SATPN) was designed to integrate classifica-tion and two image reconstruction tasks to achieve accurate diagnosis on US im-ages with small training dataset. Specifically, we enhance clinically-approved breast lesion structure characteristics though converting original breast US imag-es to BIRADS-oriented feature maps (BFMs) with…
HyFormer-Net: A Synergistic CNN-Transformer with Interpretable Multi-Scale Fusion for Breast Lesion Segmentation and Classification in Ultrasound Images
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Ahsanullah University of Science and Technology（计算机科学与工程系，阿沙努尔大学科学与技术学院）
School of Electrical Engineering, Tel-Aviv University（特拉维夫大学电气工程学院）；The Manuel and Raquel Klachky Chair of Image Processing, School of Electrical Engineering, Tel-Aviv University（特拉维夫大学电气工程学院 Manuel and Raquel Klachky 图像处理教授职位）；Diagnostic Imaging, Sheba Medical Center, affiliated to the Sackler School of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University（舍巴医疗中心诊断影像科，隶属于特拉维夫大学萨克勒医学院）
Mammography and ultrasound are extensively used by radiologists as complementary modalities to achieve better performance in breast cancer diagnosis. However, existing computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems for the breast are generally based on a single modality. In this work, we propose a deep-learning based method for classifying breast cancer lesions from their respective mammography and ultrasound images. We present various approaches and show a consistent improvement in performance when utilizing both modalities. The proposed approach is based on a GoogleNet architecture, fine-tuned for o…
Charles Stark Draper Laboratory（查尔斯·斯塔克·德拉普尔实验室）；Stanford Medicine（斯坦福医学）；Bracco Diagnostics Corporation（布拉科诊断公司）
Molecularly targeted contrast enhanced ultrasound (mCEUS) is a clinically promising approach for early cancer detection through targeted imaging of VEGFR2 (KDR) receptors. We have developed computational enhancement techniques for mCEUS tailored to address the unique challenges of imaging contrast accumulation in humans. These techniques utilize dynamic analysis to distinguish molecularly bound contrast agent from other contrast-mode signal sources, enabling analysis of contrast agent accumulation to be performed during contrast bolus arrival when the signal due to molecular binding is stronge…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Telecom Paris（巴黎电信学院）；Medicine School of Tunis（突尼斯医学院）
Breast cancer is one of the factors that cause the increase of mortality of women. The most widely used method for diagnosing this geological disease i.e. breast cancer is the ultrasound scan. Several key features such as the smoothness and the texture of the tumor captured through ultrasound scans encode the abnormality of the breast tumors (malignant from benign). However, ultrasound scans are often noisy and include irrelevant parts of the breast that may bias the segmentation of eventual tumors. In this paper, we are going to extract the region of interest ( i.e, bounding boxes of the tumo…
Weizmann Institute of Science（魏茨曼科学研究所）；Rabin Medical Center（拉宾医学中心）；Tel Aviv University（特拉维夫大学）
Breast cancer is the most common malignancy in women. Mammographic findings such as microcalcifications and masses, as well as morphologic features of masses in sonographic scans, are the main diagnostic targets for tumor detection. However, improved specificity of these imaging modalities is required. A leading alternative target is neoangiogenesis. When pathological, it contributes to the development of numerous types of tumors, and the formation of metastases. Hence, demonstrating neoangiogenesis by visualization of the microvasculature may be of great importance. Super resolution ultrasoun…
