Boundary Delineation of Breast Lesions in Series of 2D Sonography by Modeling the Spatial-Temporal Prior and Cell-Based MAP Approach

This paper proposes a general boundary delineation method for 2D serial US images by modeling the spatial-temporal dynamics and generating the object boundary in each slice under the cell-based MAP scheme. The modeling of the spatial-temporal dynamics can serve as a prior to guide the cell-based MAP process and potentially maintain the contextual coherence. Experiments have been conducted on 8 sets of compression breast series and 5 sets of freehand breast acquisitions. The computer-generated results by our algorithm are compared to manual delineations prepared by experts. The experimental results suggest that the boundaries of the proposed method are not significantly different to manual outlines and are quite stable in terms of reproducibility.