Computerized detection of breast lesions using deformable part models in ultrasound images

Ultrasound imaging is considered an important complementary technique for the screening of dense breasts. Detection of lesions at an early stage is a key step in which computerized lesion detection systems could play an important role in the analysis of US images. In this article, we propose adaptation of a generic object detection technique, deformable part models, to detect lesions in breast US images. The data set used in this study included 326 images, all from different patients (54 malignant lesions, 109 benign lesions and 163 healthy breasts). In terms of lesion detection, our proposal outperformed some of the most relevant approaches described in the literature; we obtained a sensitivity of 86% with 0.28 false-positive detection per image and an Az value of 0.975. In the detection of malignant lesions, our proposed approached had an Az value of 0.93 and a sensitivity of 78% at a 1.15 false-positive detections per image.