Freehand 3D ultrasound breast tumor segmentation

It is very important for physicians to accurately determine breast tumor location, size and shape in ultrasound image. The precision of breast tumor volume quantification relies on the accurate segmentation of the images. Given the known location and orientation of the ultrasound probe, We propose using freehand three dimensional (3D) ultrasound to acquire original images of the breast tumor and the surrounding tissues in real-time, after preprocessing with anisotropic diffusion filtering, the segmentation operation is performed slice by slice based on the level set method in the image stack. For the segmentation on each slice, the user can adjust the parameters to fit the requirement in the specified image in order to get the satisfied result. By the quantification procedure, the user can know the tumor size varying in different images in the stack. Surface rendering and interpolation are used to reconstruct the 3D breast tumor image. And the breast volume is constructed by the segmented contours in the stack of images. After the segmentation, the volume of the breast tumor in the 3D image data can be obtained.