Breast elastography diagnosis based on dynamic sequence features

The authors' proposed study provides a reliable computer-aided system which helps physicians to make diagnoses according to features computed from entire elastographic sequence. Experimental results illustrate that the diagnostic scheme is sufficient in distinguishing benign and malignant tumors. It is not necessary for physicians to spend a lot of time to determine the most suitable image for diagnosis. The tumor boundary tracking mechanism effectively eliminates the computation time since it slightly adjusts tumor boundaries between neighboring slices instead of segmenting the tumor contour on each image in the dynamic elastography. The system sufficiently reduces the variations of diagnosis caused by operator dependencies and image qualities and furthermore save physicians' workloads.