Breast cancer is the most prevalent cancer in the world and the fifth-leading cause of cancer-related death. Treatment is effective in the early stages. Thus, a need to screen considerable portions of the population is crucial. When the screening procedure uncovers a suspect lesion, a biopsy is performed to assess its potential for malignancy. This procedure is usually performed using real-time Ultrasound (US) imaging. This work proposes a visualization system for US breast biopsy. It consists of an application running on AR glasses that interact with a computer application. The AR glasses track the position of QR codes mounted on an US probe and a biopsy needle. US images are shown in the user’s field of view with enhanced lesion visualization and needle trajectory. To validate the system, latency of the transmission of US images was evaluated. Usability assessment compared our proposed prototype with a traditional approach with different users. It showed that needle alignment was more precise, with 92.67 ± 2.32° in our prototype versus 89.99 ± 37.49° in a traditional system. The users also reached the lesion more accurately. Overall, the proposed solution presents promising results, and the use of AR glasses as a tracking and visualization device exhibited good performance.This work was funded by the projects “NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000045” and “NORTE-01-
0145-FEDER-000059", supported by Northern Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE
2020), under the Portugal 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development
Fund (FEDER). It was also funded by national funds, through the FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e
a Tecnologia) and FCT/MCTES in the scope of the project UIDB/05549/2020, UIDP/05549/2020
and LASI-LA/P/0104/2020. The authors also acknowledge FCT, Portugal and the European Social
Found, European Union, for funding support through the “Programa Operacional Capital Humano”
(POCH) in the scope of the PhD grants SFRH/BD/136721/2018 (Oliveira B.) and SFRH/BD/136670
(Torres H. R.)
