2,076 research outputs found
Can high-frequency ultrasound predict metastatic lymph nodes in patients with invasive breast cancer?
Aim
To determine whether high-frequency ultrasound can predict the presence of metastatic axillary lymph nodes, with a high specificity and positive predictive value, in patients with invasive breast cancer. The clinical aim is to identify patients with axillary disease requiring surgery who would not normally, on clinical grounds, have an axillary dissection, so potentially improving outcome and survival rates.
Materials and methods
The ipsilateral and contralateral axillae of 42 consecutive patients with invasive breast cancer were scanned prior to treatment using a B-mode frequency of 13 MHz and a Power Doppler frequency of 7 MHz. The presence or absence of an echogenic centre for each lymph node detected was recorded, and measurements were also taken to determine the L/S ratio and the widest and narrowest part of the cortex. Power Doppler was also used to determine vascularity. The contralateral axilla was used as a control for each patient.
Results
In this study of patients with invasive breast cancer, ipsilateral lymph nodes with a cortical bulge ≥3 mm and/or at least two lymph nodes with absent echogenic centres indicated the presence of metastatic axillary lymph nodes (10 patients). The sensitivity and specificity were 52.6% and 100%, respectively, positive and negative predictive values were 100% and 71.9%, respectively, the P value was 0.001 and the Kappa score was 0.55.\ud
Conclusion
This would indicate that high-frequency ultrasound can be used to accurately predict metastatic lymph nodes in a proportion of patients with invasive breast cancer, which may alter patient management
A Computer Aided Detection system for mammographic images implemented on a GRID infrastructure
The use of an automatic system for the analysis of mammographic images has
proven to be very useful to radiologists in the investigation of breast cancer,
especially in the framework of mammographic-screening programs. A breast
neoplasia is often marked by the presence of microcalcification clusters and
massive lesions in the mammogram: hence the need for tools able to recognize
such lesions at an early stage. In the framework of the GPCALMA (GRID Platform
for Computer Assisted Library for MAmmography) project, the co-working of
italian physicists and radiologists built a large distributed database of
digitized mammographic images (about 5500 images corresponding to 1650
patients) and developed a CAD (Computer Aided Detection) system, able to make
an automatic search of massive lesions and microcalcification clusters. The CAD
is implemented in the GPCALMA integrated station, which can be used also for
digitization, as archive and to perform statistical analyses. Some GPCALMA
integrated stations have already been implemented and are currently on clinical
trial in some italian hospitals. The emerging GRID technology can been used to
connect the GPCALMA integrated stations operating in different medical centers.
The GRID approach will support an effective tele- and co-working between
radiologists, cancer specialists and epidemiology experts by allowing remote
image analysis and interactive online diagnosis.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, to appear in the Proceedings of the 13th
IEEE-NPSS Real Time Conference 2003, Montreal, Canada, May 18-23 200
Foundation and methodologies in computer-aided diagnosis systems for breast cancer detection
Breast cancer is the most prevalent cancer that affects women all over the world. Early detection
and treatment of breast cancer could decline the mortality rate. Some issues such as technical
reasons, which related to imaging quality and human error, increase misdiagnosis of breast cancer
by radiologists. Computer-aided detection systems (CADs) are developed to overcome these
restrictions and have been studied in many imaging modalities for breast cancer detection in recent
years. The CAD systems improve radiologists’ performance in finding and discriminat- ing between
the normal and abnormal tissues. These procedures are performed only as a double reader but the
absolute decisions are still made by the radiologist. In this study, the recent CAD systems for
breast cancer detec- tion on different modalities such as mammography, ultrasound, MRI, and biopsy
histopathological images are introduced. The foundation of CAD systems generally consist of four
stages: Pre-processing, Segmentation, Fea- ture extraction, and Classification. The approaches
which applied to design different stages of CAD system are summarised. Advantages and disadvantages
of different segmentation, feature extraction and classification tech- niques are listed.
In addition, the impact of imbalanced datasets in classification outcomes and appropriate methods to
solve these issues are discussed. As well as, performance evaluation metrics for various stages of
breast cancer detection CAD systems are reviewed
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Elicitation and representation of expert knowledge for computer aided diagnosis in mammography
To study how professional radiologists describe, interpret and make decisions about micro-calcifications in mammograms. The purpose was to develop a model of the radiologists' decision making for use in CADMIUM II, a computerized aid for mammogram interpretation that combines symbolic reasoning with image processing
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