Computer-aided diagnosis of breast masses using quantified BI-RADS findings

The information from radiologists was utilized in the proposed computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) for breast tumor classification. The ultrasound (US) database used in this study contained 166 benign and 78 malignant masses. For each mass, six quantitative feature sets were used to describe the radiologists' grading of six Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System (BI-RADS) categories including shape, orientation, margins, lesion boundary, echo pattern, and posterior acoustic features on breast US. The descriptive abilities were between 76% and 82% and the predicted descriptors were then used for tumor classification. Using receiver operating characteristic curve for evaluation, the area under curve (AUC) of the proposed CAD was slightly better than that of a conventional CAD based on the combination of all quantitative features (0.96 vs. 0.93, p= 0.18). The partial AUC over 90% sensitivity of the proposed CAD was significantly better than that of the conventional CAD (0.90 vs. 0.76, p<0.05). In conclusion, the computer-aided analysis with qualitative information from radiologists showed a promising result for breast tumor classification.