LAUSR

BackgroundAnti-radial ultrasound scanning is one of the main scanning approaches used in ultrasound breast screening. It can be used for cross-sectional imaging of mammary ductal/lobular tissue and provide information about suspicious tissue. It has certain advantages compared to linear scanning, but automatic anti-radial scanning is not yet available. Our goal is to propose an ultrasound scanning system for whole breast anti-radial scanning.MethodsWe previously developed an automatic ultrasound scanning system for whole breast screening involving linear scanning. The present study builds on our previous work by incorporating (1) surface-reconstruction algorithms, (2) a rotatable holder design, and (3) a scan-path-smoothing algorithm to achieve conformal anti-radial scanning.ResultsAn improvement of approximately 40% in the normal-vector estimation is obtained with our new method, and the scan stability is improved by the scan-path-smoothing algorithm. 3D volume data of each scan are available.ConclusionsWe have successfully developed an automatic ultrasound scanning system for anti-radial breast scanning. This type of system, which has not been reported previously in the literature, can be an effective tool for fully automatic ultrasound breast screening.