A new automated breast ultrasound system with dual wide field-of-view imaging

Breast ultrasound imaging is useful for observing the mass according to the desired locations and differentiating the shape of consistency of the mass during breast cancer screening, but its performance is highly dependent on the examiners' skill and has a poor reproducibility. Recently-introduced automated breast ultrasound (ABUS) systems have a potential to decrease user dependency due to its automated scanning protocols. However, the current ABUS system suffers from the limited field-of-view (FOV) and the long scanning time. In this paper, a new automated breast ultrasound system with dual wide field-of-view imaging is presented. In the developed ABUS system, two 1024-element wide field-of-view linear array transducers are used for accelerating scanning time. To support dual wide transducers, two 1024-to-128 high-voltage multiplexing board and four transmit/ receive boards were embedded. The beamformed radio-frequency data are transferred to a PC module via a PCI express 2.0 interface, and then mid and back-end processing is conducted by a graphics processing unit using CUDA. This system can acquire a 3D breast volume set with 20 cm (width) × 25 cm (length) × 8 cm (depth) within 20 seconds. The further evaluation of the developed ABUS system including pre-clinical studies is under investigation. These results indicate that the proposed dual wide FOV-based ABUS system can enlarge the FOV and reduce the volume scanning time for improving clinical productivity of breast ultrasound imaging.