Vascular morphologic information of three-dimensional power Doppler ultrasound is valuable in the classification of breast lesions

Doppler ultrasound imaging provides vascular information that could characterize benign and malignant breast masses in many previous publications. In this study, we applied vascular quantification and morphology features derived from three-dimensional power Doppler ultrasound as classifiers based on support vector machine. An Az value under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was used to measure the significance of each vascularization feature. Sixty solid breast tumors were assessed. According to the Az value for the ROC curve of the selected features, the classification performance of the proposed method was 0.8423, indicating that vascular morphologic information is valuable in the classification of breast lesions. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.