Automatic Identification of Breast Ultrasound Image Based on Supervised Block-Based Region Segmentation Algorithm and Features Combination Migration Deep Learning Model

Abstract
Breast cancer is a high-incidence type of cancer for women. Early diagnosis plays a crucial role in the successful treatment of the disease and the effective reduction of deaths. In this paper, deep learning technology combined with ultrasound imaging diagnosis was used to identify and determine whether the tumors were benign or malignant. First, the tumor regions were segmented from the breast ultrasound (BUS) images using the supervised block-based region segmentation algorithm. Then, a VGG-19 network pretrained on the ImageNet dataset was applied to the segmented BUS images to predict whether the breast tumor was benign or malignant. The benchmark data for bio-validation were obtained from 141 patients with 199 breast tumors, including 69 cases of malignancy and 130 cases of benign tumors. The experiment showed that the accuracy of the supervised block-based region segmentation algorithm was almost the same as that of manual segmentation; therefore, it can replace manual work. The diagnostic effect of the combination feature model established based on the depth feature of the B-mode ultrasonic imaging and strain elastography was better than that of the model established based on these two images alone. The correct recognition rate was 92.95%, and the AUC was 0.98 for the combination feature model.
Funding Information
  • National Key Research and Development Program of China Stem Cell and Translational Research
  • Wireless Probe Type Handheld Intelligent Ultrasound Imager (2016YFC0105000)