Chest-wall segmentation in automated 3D breast ultrasound images using thoracic volume classification

Computer-aided detection (CAD) systems are expected to improve effectiveness and efficiency of radiologists in reading automated 3D breast ultrasound (ABUS) images. One challenging task on developing CAD is to reduce a large number of false positives. A large amount of false positives originate from acoustic shadowing caused by ribs. Therefore determining the location of the chestwall in ABUS is necessary in CAD systems to remove these false positives. Additionally it can be used as an anatomical landmark for inter- and intra-modal image registration. In this work, we extended our previous developed chestwall segmentation method that fits a cylinder to automated detected rib-surface points and we fit the cylinder model by minimizing a cost function which adopted a term of region cost computed from a thoracic volume classifier to improve segmentation accuracy. We examined the performance on a dataset of 52 images where our previous developed method fails. Using region-based cost, the average mean distance of the annotated points to the segmented chest wall decreased from 7.57±2.76 mm to 6.22±2.86 mm.art.