3D High-Definition Flow Power Doppler Sonography Studies of Breast Tumors using Vascularization Evaluation

• Main Authors: Lien, I-Pin, 連怡斌
• Other Authors: Huang,Yu-Len
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/08410052129485682691

碩士 === 東海大學 === 資訊工程學系 === 99 === According to American Cancer Society (ACS) statistics, breast cancer is the most common cancer among women in USA. It is the second leading cause of cancer death in women. Tumor vascularization has been proved to be an important factor that correlated with tumor malignancy. Angiogenesis is widely accepted as a process for the growth of cancers. In this study, high-definition flow (HDF) power Doppler ultrasound (US) is performed to investigate blood flow and solid directional flow information in breast tumors. The vascularization of tumor would be used as a factor to estimate the effect of the neo-adjuvant chemotherapy prior to surgery. This study aims to evaluate vascularity changes in three-dimensional (3D) HDF power Doppler ultrasound images during neo-adjuvant chemotherapy of breast cancer in patients. The proposed method utilizes 3D Gaussian lowpass filter to reduce the noise and speckles and applies a 3D thinning algorithm for extracting vascularity centerlines. The color of voxel within the HDF Doppler sonography indicates the direction information of blood flow in the vascular centre-line. In this study, six vascularity quantization features, three morphological features and two vascular direction features are extracted for evaluate the correlation between the vascularity changes and neo-adjuvant chemotherapy effect.