An automated breast ultrasound system for elastography

An automated breast ultrasound system (ABUS) has recently been introduced for breast screening and monitoring of cancer treatment. ABUS enables clinicians to acquire ultrasound images from the entire breast tissue in a few minutes. In this work we report the addition of tissue elasticity imaging to the ABUS system that enables the clinician to automatically acquire 3D strain volume of the breast tissue. The performance of the system is validated experimentally using a commercial breast elasticity phantom. The results show that the proposed automated system can reliably generate elasticity images of the breast tissue that can be reviewed by clinicians along side ultrasound images.