서강대학교

초록 (요약문)

X-ray mammography has been mainly used for early diagnosis of breast cancer, which has the world's number one cancer incidence and mortality rate. However, for women under 40 years of age or with dense breasts, the diagnosis accuracy of X-ray mammography becomes substantially low. The recently developed automated breast ultrasound system (ABUS) is used as a complementary diagnostic tool. In ABUS, multi-angle spatial compounding, in which multiple transmit beams are steered with pre-determined angles and the receive beams are coherently summed together, is applied for enhancing image quality while reducing shadow artifacts caused by absorption of sound waves from objects, such as nipple and mass. However, this method suffers from the reduction in the intensity from the target lesions and the blurring since the transducer mechanically moves and compounds between frames in different positions. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a real-time spatial compounding method with elevational synthetic aperture focusing, which can compensate the unwanted reduction in target intensities by performing synthetic aperture focusing in the elevation direction. In addition, beamformed frames in the lateral direction are subjected to bidirectional dynamic focusing by calculating transmit and receive delays in the elevation direction. Finally, spatial compounding is applied to those frames. With the proposed method, spatial resolution, signal-to-noise ratio, and contrast can be improved by compensating intensity loss of the target yielded from the ABUS. Moreover, the proposed method can facilitate the diagnosis improvement in early detection of breast cancers.