3D automated breast ultrasound imaging: equipment and image reconstruction

Purpose: It has been proven that early breast cancer diagnosis increases the success rate of treatment. Thus, annual mammography exam is recommended for women over forty which is relatively expensive, painful, and the safety of the used radiation dose is still debated. In this work, we introduced an automatic, low cost, and less painful exam to pre-diagnose the tumors of the breast. Method: The proposed imaging acquisition system uses a diagnostic ultrasound machine in B-mode, a linear probe, and a dedicated arm fixed below a bed in which all are controlled by a microcontroller. The breast is scanned underwater while patient is laid down on a bed in which the robotic arm guides the probe rotating to acquire a stack of 2D images. Then, we reconstructed the 3D image due to render the mammary volume, search for tumors, estimating the position, and volume size of them. We tuned and evaluated the imaging system using a control phantom made of paraffin-gel wax and deionized water, and a realistic breast phantom (Gphantom model), including eleven inclusions mimicking breast tumors. In addition, we scanned the phantoms by MRI and CT to evaluate the proposed method. Also, we scanned the breast of three invited volunteers and compared the results to their prior medical reports. Results: The precision in volume estimation of the tumor in the control phantom was 96.89%. Conclusion: The proposed hardware setup and image reconstruction was capable of identifying simulated tumors in the breast phantom and real tumor in vivo studies. © 2021, Sociedade Brasileira de Engenharia Biomedica.