Importance of transducer position tracking for automated breast ultrasound: Initial assessments

Breast cancer causes the most cancer deaths in women all over the world. Given the unknown cause and invasive nature of the disease, early detection and treatment is crucial to the survival of the cancer patients. X-rays mammography is an effective screening tool for breast cancer but misses nearly half of them in women with dense breasts, in which case supplemental ultrasound (US) screening must be used. Recent development in 3D automated breast ultrasound (ABUS) provides a faster and potentially more accurate alternative to the conventional 2D hand-held US in detecting the tumors. Typically in these systems, a custom-built linear or curvilinear transducer is automatically swept over or rotated around the tissue to acquire a set of 2D images, from which a 3D high-resolution volume of the breast can be reconstructed. In this work, we study the importance of transducer position tracking in the ABUS volume reconstruction process. Our experiments show that an accurate localization of the images results in a more accurate volume reconstruction.