Level set contouring for breast tumor in sonography.

The echogenicity, echotexture, shape, and contour of a lesion are revealed to be effective sonographic features for physicians to identify a tumor as either benign or malignant. Automatic contouring for breast tumors in sonography may assist physicians without relevant experience, in making correct diagnoses. This study develops an efficient method for automatically detecting contours of breast tumors in sonography. First, a sophisticated preprocessing filter reduces the noise, but preserves the shape and contrast of the breast tumor. An adaptive initial contouring method is then performed to obtain an approximate circular contour of the tumor. Finally, the deformation-based level set segmentation automatically extracts the precise contours of breast tumors from ultrasound (US) images. The proposed contouring method evaluates US images from 118 patients with breast tumors. The contouring results, obtained with computer simulation, reveal that the proposed method always identifies similar contours to those obtained with manual sketching. The proposed method provides robust and fast automatic contouring for breast US images. The potential role of this approach might save much of the time required to sketch a precise contour with very high stability.