Image Processing of Ultrasound Color Doppler to Characterize Malignant Breast Lesion

Breast cancer, the most common cancer in women, is one of the major causes for the increase in mortality among women especially in developed countries. Doppler ultrasound is an important noninvasive diagnostic tool for identifying breast malignancies. We present a novel technique for segmenting blood vessels in ultrasound color Doppler images based on image processing techniques. The proposed technique decomposes a complex object representing either two or more vessels artificially linked together or a main vessel with its branches. We segment out the blood vessels in ultrasound color Doppler images and count the number of vessels to detect breast malignancy. Matlab has been used to simulate the algorithm and the results obtained are presented in this paper. The result represents distinct vessels that can be used in further object recognition and quantification applications.