鈣化血管之偵測於乳房攝影

Abstract

乳房血管鈣化，在近幾年來逐漸被探討是否有可能為女性心血管疾病與慢性腎臟病的有效生物標記；為了提供更有效的量化分析，我們在本文中提出了一乳房血管鈣化偵測的演算法。具體來說，我們使用了兩個主要的線索，也就是，鈣化與血管特徵值，並且套入了一容納不確定性的血管追蹤演算法。此一新的血管追蹤演算法產生了數個不同可能樣本血管個體來描述複雜的鈣化血管拓樸結構。之後我們發展了一套匯編與連結的處理方法，將這些測得的樣本血管個體整理以及連接。此一發展之方法套用到63組乳房攝影影像中；為了進行效能分析，我們產生了四組演算法生成的結果並將其與兩組手繪作比較。比較的測量值包含了三個計量測量值以及兩個臨床測量值。實驗結果證實了我們方法的有效性與穩定性，且有潛力成為方便的血管鈣化量化的工具來替代繁瑣的手繪過程。

As a potential biomarker for women's cardiovascular and chronic kidney diseases, breast arterial calcification (BAC) in mammography has become an emerging research topic in recent years. To provide more objective measurement for vascular structures with calcium depositions in mammography, a new computerized method is introduced in this paper to delineate the calcified vessels. Specifically, we leverage two underlying cues, namely calcification and vesselness, into a multiple seeded tracking with uncertainty scheme. This new vessel-tracking scheme generates plenty of sampling paths to describe the complicated topology of the vascular structures with calcium depositions. A compiling and linking process is further carried out to organize the sampling paths together to be the vessel segments that likely belong to the same vessel tract. The proposed method has been tested on 63 mammograms. For performance evaluation, four sets of our computer-estimated results are evaluated by the two sets of manual delineation results from two experts, by using three assessment metrics and two clinical metrics. The experiment results confirm the efficacy and stability of the proposed method, and also indicate that the proposed method can be potentially used as a convenient BAC measurement tool to replace the trivial and tedious manual delineation tasks.